


The Feast (and Leftovers Man Was Meant to Eat)

by Guede



Series: Of Werewolves and Tentacles [9]
Category: Cthulhu Mythos - Fandom, Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Belly Rubs, Body Language, Cthulhu Mythos, F/M, Graduate Student Stiles Stilinski, Humor, Laura Hale Lives, M/M, Magical Stiles Stilinski, Polyamory, Sheriff Stilinski's Name is John, Tentacles, Thanksgiving
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-29
Updated: 2019-12-13
Packaged: 2021-02-26 06:20:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 23,656
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21599053
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Guede/pseuds/Guede
Summary: Stiles is looking forward to a nice, homey Thanksgiving with his boyfriends, his family, and the whole Beacon Hills crew.  Because it’s Thankgiving.  Even the cosmic tentacle aliens don’t come on Thanksgiving.Sadly, nobody else seems to understand this.
Relationships: Allison Argent/Scott McCall, Chris Argent/Melissa McCall/Sheriff Stilinski, Derek Hale/Peter Hale/Stiles Stilinski, Derek Hale/Stiles Stilinski, Peter Hale/Stiles Stilinski
Series: Of Werewolves and Tentacles [9]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/594739
Comments: 59
Kudos: 162





	1. Chapter 1

Nothing happens on Thanksgiving.

Everyone outside of Arkham, Massachusetts who actually knows about the town is always surprised about this, but it’s true. Nothing happens on Thanksgiving. Nobody opens portals to forbidden dimensions, cosmically indifferent aliens don’t rise out of the depths to crush humanity. Even the evil wizards take the day off. “Because it’s _New England_ ,” Stiles explains. “They invented Thanksgiving.”

“Well, okay, but I thought you said that Christmas tends to be tricky,” Allison says, frowning and fidgeting with her crossbow.

“That’s because Christmas was a historical attempt to repurpose pagan rituals around the winter solstice, except nobody ever really bought what the Catholic Church was selling, they just bought a new set of decorations,” Stiles says. He watches the rest of them, debating whether he wants to keep pushing on this or not. These are his friends, and he is supposed to be here on vacation, and he promised his dad that that was going to mean actual time away from his books and not just a workaround for Miskatonic’s automated study-carrel eviction system. “Um, look, so I get things might be a little different here—not that I’m saying your customs are _bad_ or anything, I just—”

“They’re not really customs. We don’t go out looking or anything, honestly,” Scott assures him, from somewhere behind the mini-fortress of boxes the man’s created for himself. “We don’t _want_ to use these, trust me. But just in case it comes up.”

Stiles opens his mouth, then shuts it. 

“And trust _me_ when I say that I’d rather just rip out a spine, but I got outvoted on that a few years ago,” Laura says. She swings the bag off her shoulder and spreads open the zipper, then starts scooping boxes into it. “So if we’re going to do it that way, then we’re gonna get the elephant tranqs in bulk. Or else I will rip out a spine and I’m not taking any lecture about redeem and rehab about it.”

“You didn’t rip anything last year, so much as duck behind some cars. _Scott_ was the one who finally pinned the guy,” Allison says tartly. She unstrings her crossbow and folds it up with a crisp _click_ that makes Laura raise her brows and square her shoulders.

Then they both step back from the table as Scott, slightly rushed, plunks down a double-armful of wooden stakes. “Hey, okay, it was a team effort,” he says, and then yelps because all the little boxes of tranq darts are falling around him. He starts grabbing at them. “Everybody helped, it was fine, we ended up straightening things out—”

Laura casually tilts her bag to catch some of the boxes. “You mean your mom whipped out a shotgun and explained _exactly_ how she was going to falsify those autopsy reports.”

“Only because your pack couldn’t pull off a stakeout if we gagged them, and Dad was too busy trying to clean up Peter’s—” Allison twitches halfway through what’s clearly going to be an epic takedown, then shoots Stiles a look. She’s not quite guilty, but does feel like it’ll be awkward to shit-talk Peter in front of him, and so when she misses the boxes she’s been trying to scoop up and instead gets a couple squirrels instead, it takes her a good two seconds to realize they don’t stack.

Allison eeps and hurriedly puts the mini-Quints down on the table. They wiggle a little, dropping the boxes they’d retrieved from their tentacles, and then merge together so unitary Quint can scurry back up to the safety of Scott’s shoulder. Laura and Scott both stop too, temporarily distracted, and Stiles takes the opportunity to hold up the reason he’d come into the room to begin with: the diagram on Peter’s iPad.

“Okay, anyway, so since as I love your mom’s casseroles, Scott, Dad and I aren’t complete freeloaders, I just wanted to know—” he starts and then the garage door behind Scott bangs open.

“Hey, so pit traps are done and Isaac fixed the short so we’ve got enough juice out there to barbecue a whole herd of chupacabras and I am ready to start this party!” Erica sings out, as she and Boyd and Cora come in with pitchforks and scythes and what appears to be an actual flail. “Even got my Cyber Monday bookmarks on, so if I lose my boots I—oh, that looks sweet, Stiles. Is that the latest boobytrap from Miskatonic? Isaac was totally saying you were gonna show up with something to export people into Shub-Niggurath’s mouth.”

“It’s a turkey fryer,” Stiles says.

Everyone pauses for a second.

“Because…I thought Thanksgiving was about eating. Food. I mean, we were going to help with the cooking,” Stiles says, sounding increasingly lame. Which is annoying, because one, he spent about three hours trawling the Internet and aggregating designs and optimizing, and two, he _does_ have boobytrap designs and if somebody had warned him, he would have pulled those out, but normally he just doesn’t think about that and Turkey Day and…this must be how his dad feels whenever he’s trying to remind Stiles that Miskatonic normal is really an oxymoron. “Do you…not do Thanksgiving here?”

“Oh! Oh, no, we totally do, we just—” Scott glances at the various weapons and weapons-related supplies around the garage, and even his sunniness wilts a little “—we just—this is just part of the prep. Just in case. But we do celebrate it and we’re totally going to sit down and have dinner with you. We’re not going to just run off into the woods all day.”

“I like Cajun-style deep fry,” Boyd offers.

Scott briefly perks up. And then Cora snorts and shoulders her pitchfork, saying “Well, probably not till lunch, anyway. Usually they wait till we’ve eaten to ambush us.”

“Ambush?” Stiles sighs.

“No, no, it’s fine, nothing’s going to happen,” Scott says, starting to look panicky. Which in turn means Quint starts to chitter nervously, so Scott reaches up and starts soothing him, which only highlights how agitated Scott is, which now means that Allison looks as if she’s communing with the spirits of her ancestors and ready to get back on their genocidal wagon. “It’s fine. It’s fine, really. You’re gonna have a great holiday, I’ll make sure—”

“Okay, okay, I’m…I can check elsewhere for the pulleys, no sweat,” Stiles says, giving Scott the sincerest smile he can muster and then nodding at Allison. “You go do your prep, I’ll stop interrupting. It’s all good, we all have our things, and I should get on my bird prep, come to think of it. I’ll keep myself busy. It’s cool.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Don't build your own turkey deep-frying rig and become one of those cautionary videos on YouTube. Stiles can stash any hot-oil overflow in a pocket fold of space-time, thanks to non-Euclidean geometry.


	2. Chapter 2

“It is _not_ cool,” Stiles says to Derek. “I thought we talked about this, you give me a heads-up on the tortured history and I promise not to be an asshole about it, it’s just for referential purposes till you want it to not be just for that because I respect the fact that everybody has their own timeline for coping. I just—”

Derek had been sleeping on the couch when Stiles came into the living room of his father’s rental house, but as soon as Stiles had opened his mouth, he’d woken up. He rolls halfway up, doesn’t even totally look Stiles’ way, and then bends back down.

“—want to know. I mean, if you don’t do the holiday, that’s fine! It’s fine! We don’t have to, if anything, Miskatonic’s taught me the value of taking a firm no-holiday stance considering a true pan-denominational stance means accepting the Deep Ones’ ideas on ancestor consumption and, just, no—”

“I made you a movie,” Derek says, sitting back up with his laptop in hand. He flicks a sideways glance at Stiles and it’d come off as dismissive but for the fact that Stiles now automatically subtracts the leather coat shielding from Derek’s body language, and deduces the guy is feeling embarrassed.

And, well, movies. Now that Derek’s videography skills are not just out in the open, but properly bankrolled by Miskatonic’s Student Preservation and Affairs Department, he’s revealed that he doesn’t just make movies for no-budget amateur horror auteurs with a concept and an Indiegogo campaign, but that he does it all the time for his personal reference. In fact, he’s got close to a thousand hours of video vignettes that document various bits of werewolf and other supernatural knowledge, including some stuff that Peter doesn’t even remember researching for this or that Beacon Hills emergency. If it wasn’t for the fact that Stiles already has a standing alert on the University’s HR recruiting database for Hale mentions (expense accounts are one thing, helping your relationship partner bargain to keep the souls of their reincarnations is another), he would have long since begged Derek to transfer all of that into Miskatonic’s online archives for easy cross-referencing.

As it is, whenever Derek mentions one of his videos, Stiles shuts up and rearranges his schedule. 

“I told Peter about it, too,” Derek says about a minute in. He still hasn’t taken off his coat, and when Stiles manages to will himself to hit ‘pause’ and look over, Derek’s picking at his claws. Which vanish when he realizes Stiles is staring. “I think he said he was going to tell you about it, but then your turkey order got lost and I forgot he wasn’t going to come in till later today.”

“Okay,” Stiles says. He’s not as mad as he was—honestly, he wasn’t mad so much as just trying to work up to having another ‘so how many ways was Beacon Hills awful to you’ talk and covering it up with frustration. Which is shitty of him, and he’d also promised to try to remember that sometimes they’re not trying to hide things from him and just genuinely forget he’s not looped in. “And I guess you’re still trying to catch up on sleep from that double shoot in the labs.”

Derek shrugs like ten hours stuck in a Level Three containment facility with Elder Thing artifacts followed by three hours of decontam with Stiles’ father’s team (who are great, really, but who are required to take quarterly resocialization sessions for a reason) isn’t a big deal. “Your dad said he just needed to catch up with Melissa about something and then we could hit the hardware store, so I didn’t want to go where he’d have to look for me.”

“That’s really nice of you, but his meetings with her average thirty-seven minutes so I think you could’ve just hit the bedroom,” Stiles sighs. He starts to reach for the laptop, then stops as Derek moves.

The other man stops, looking at him, and then carefully slides the laptop to Stiles’ lap. Stiles takes it and leans back and happens to let the cushions bounce his legs up so that one flops over Derek’s knee; Derek gives it a look like maybe it could be hostile, but then snorts and finishes his twist by shrugging out of his coat instead of getting up. Then he carefully folds it and lays it aside while Stiles starts up the video again.

“Peter and I both aren’t doing whatever they’re doing this year,” he says. He slouches back into the couch. His shoulder nudges into Stiles. He shifts his weight and his leg slides under Stiles’ knee, and then his hair brushes into Stiles’ ear. When Stiles doesn’t do anything, Derek scoots that one more inch so that he’s pressing fully into Stiles’ side. “We told them, just tell us where the weapons caches at home are and we’ll watch the food, but keep us out of it.”

“So you do eat?” Stiles says, half-distracted. He’s currently watching a segment that appears to be about Scott’s junior year in high school and Derek’s managed to dig up some really vintage tweets from fellow students. Also, Derek cuddling is a rare event, in part because it can take upwards of five minutes for the guy to fully sink into it, and until that happens, Scott sneezing down the street can cause Derek to call it off. Stiles has previously made the mistake of tossing an arm over too soon and he’s not going to repeat it. “Sorry, I didn’t mean—”

“I’m not bulimic or starving, Stiles,” Derek says, more ironic than sarcastic. His knuckles twitch against Stiles’ thigh, and then he shifts them up to rest on the edge of the laptop. “I just need more calories than normal people. And your dad caught onto what you were doing and moved the living room stashes.”

“Oh, he did? Damn it, I really thought I did a good job with the repackaging,” Stiles says mournfully. “I worked really hard on photoshopping those nutritional labels.”

“You can photoshop them all you want and that stuff still isn’t going to taste like actual Doritos,” Derek says.

Stiles rolls his eyes. “Because they’re _better_. Organic, natural ingredients that haven’t been processed so much that you need a spectrometer to figure out whether they originated in a farm at some point.”

“Yeah, what I mean,” Derek says.

Stiles pauses the video again and looks over. Derek looks back, doing one of his resting bitchfaces, and then suddenly, gloriously, he cracks a smile. Not a sneer or a smirk, but a real, amused smile, complete with eyes that actually reflect it.

“Okay, fine, it’s Thanksgiving anyway,” Stiles mutters, slumping into the man. He adjusts the laptop so it won’t slide off his lap and then turns his head a little, just enough to create a gap between his chin and Derek’s forehead. He holds it and his breath for a second, and then, success: Derek obligingly nuzzles under, then settles against Stiles’ collarbone with a barely-audible whuff. “This and his birthday are the only times of the year that he gets a meal pass. Even the medical establishment’s concern for his cardiovascular system can’t deny him his cheesy potatoes and sausage-based stuffing.”

Derek grunts, but it’s a satisfied grunt. Stiles gives his belly a pat, swallowing back the sudden desire to pump a fist in the air, and goes back to the video.

Ten minutes later, he stops it again and checks how much time is left. “Okay, I am going to watch all of this, and not just because I am a whore for real-time sociological case studies in how to talk people out of believing the hard evidence right in front of them,” Stiles says. “But…”

Derek’s not exactly tense—he’s still comfortably flopped against Stiles—but he’s definitely gotten an alert air. “I don’t actually think there’s anything really going on,” he says. “Peter called Laura and Melissa last week, and I know he did his own vetting. It’s just—”

“Historical precedent shows something _is_ gonna go down, and yeah, look, the History department has a whole chair dedicated to all of the ways that history’s been manipulated to repeat itself,” Stiles sighs. He absently prods the side of the laptop. “It’s not that. And it’s also not that I’m trying to judge or anything, it’s just…I also don’t want to come in and you’re all trying to dress this up for me. Look, I like Thanksgiving, but it’s just a day off. If it’s too much to do what you normally do and my stuff, it’s not like my or Dad’s feelings are going to get hurt.”

He's not actually expecting Derek to respond, or do anything besides just grunt and maybe remind Stiles about the video. He knows that working through personal drama of any kind and for anyone, including himself, is not Derek’s idea of a good time, or even Derek’s idea of a necessary part of life. He’s really just talking to himself and trying to push past his residual feelings of annoyance and outsiderness to where he can summon up the energy to politely ignore whatever his friends are doing, and pretend it’s a good holiday.

So when Derek suddenly pushes himself up and pulls the laptop away, Stiles is too startled to stop him. “Come on,” Derek says.

“What?” Stiles says, blinking.

Derek visibly restrains his eyebrows from descending to grumpy. “Come on,” he says again. “If your dad’s busy, we can just go to the hardware store without him. You said you wanted to get the fryer up today so you could road-test its carrying weight, right?”

That is, in fact, what Stiles had said, in his exact wording. Sometimes people take Derek’s monosyllabic tendencies to mean he isn’t paying attention but when it comes to things like that, the guy’s got a photographic memory. “Uh, yeah, I did, but—”

“They’re all gonna want to eat, that’s the same every year,” Derek says. He picks up his coat and throws it on, then looks back at Stiles. “It’s not you—”

“Well, I know, and I can’t really blame them about wanting to maximize life expectancy and minimize unforeseen corpses—”

“It’s not like going to the same restaurant every year either,” Derek keeps going as he folds up his laptop. “This town is shitty and that’s not actually something anybody likes, it’s just what we put up with. So if you cook and it’s good food, they’re gonna want it. Nobody actually wants to fight people this week.”

Stiles opens his mouth, then closes it. He catches himself looking towards the laptop and drags his gaze back to Derek, who’s still standing there with minimum bitchface, and…smiles. “I know you’re trying when you act like a fight doesn’t get your blood going.”

Derek rolls his eyes. “Yeah, but I don’t need to fight on _Thanksgiving_. I can do that on Black Friday.”

“So your sisters can’t make you haul all the shopping bags?” Stiles guesses, as he gets up off the couch.

“They don’t want me touching those, that’s more like Scott with Allison,” Derek snorts. “They make me go first at those doorbuster openings so they can squeeze in while I’m getting smashed by the other people.”

Stiles winces. “Okay, that’s not really a fight so much as a suicide charge. You know that, right?”

Derek does, and that isn’t the problem, and he communicates that with another eyeroll as he moves over for Stiles to follow him towards the door. They go a couple steps and end up by his bags, which he hasn’t moved to the guest bedroom, and he slows down. Then looks at Stiles and snorts and hands Stiles his laptop.

“Just don’t try and show me stuff when I’m driving,” he says. “I made it, Stiles. I know what’s in it.”

“Well, I know, I just—sometimes I just—want to check that I’m still in the same reality,” Stiles says, wounded. “Some of the clips you’ve got are kind of crazy, even compared to my Antarctic field studies course.”

“That’s Beacon Hills,” Derek shrugs. “So we’ll get your turkey stuff and set it up before Erica can steal all the wire for her catapult again.”

Stiles manages to wait all of three minutes, which is a _record_ for him. “Catapult?”

“Another eight minutes and…” Derek thinks “…twenty or thirty seconds in. It was actually Allison’s idea, she just was grounded by her dad or something so Scott had to get somebody else to build it.”

“Okay, then,” Stiles says, tucking the laptop under his arm. “I guess at least I know how I’m gonna pass the time while the turkey’s in the oil.”

* * *

Derek drives them over to the hardware store, which surprisingly, given the amount of gear in the garage, still has plenty of supplies. Then they sit in the parking lot for a few minutes while Stiles finishes up the current segment of the movie and Derek takes Peter’s call about the status of the turkey.

“He’s trying to figure out how to thaw it in time, because he’s got it but he says they did slap it on ice before things got straightened out,” Derek says as he and Stiles finally get out of the car. “So it’s half-frozen.”

“Okay, so add hair dryers or other hot-air circulators to the list,” Stiles says. “So what about casualties?”

“What?” Derek says. It’s not a question so much as a flat interjection about Stiles even bothering to ask when he knows what Peter’s been up to. 

A lack of squeamishness and moral flexibility are, Stiles is not going to lie, high on the list of things that he finds attractive. That said, his father never would have let him sign up for _any_ classes with a field component if he didn’t think Stiles would read Miskatonic’s protocols for handling unsuspecting bystanders, groan, and rewrite them to actually account for things like social media and widespread gun ownership and a criminal justice system that, while problematic, still actually _investigates murders_. So Stiles snags a cart and promptly steers it and Derek down the aisles in a way that he’s been reliably informed will hit most of the security-cam blindspots.

“Seriously, you know I only care to the extent that it’s going to make work for Dad, because ever since the frog incident, he’s professionally interested in what a complete moron your local law enforcement chief is and can’t help helping out Melissa,” Stiles sighs. They come up on a wall of pulleys and he stops to figure out whether things are ordered by wheel size, load-bearing capacity, or price. “And you know and I know she gets annoyed when somebody springs a body on her, even if Dad’s now offering Miskatonic’s disposal facilities.”

“She’ll be annoyed anyway, since it’s this week,” Derek says. He flicks his eyes up and down the shelves, then reaches out and picks up a three-pack and throws it into the cart. “Anyway, I thought that that’s part of the holiday.”

“What, getting thrown in jail because Melissa wants to know where you are while she rips the sheriff a new one over messing with her files?” Stiles says.

Derek grimaces. Once you spend a decent amount of time with him, you start to realize that he’s improvising a lot of the fuck-you attitude and actually gets pretty embarrassed when you point out the logic holes. “Wouldn’t be the worst Thanksgiving,” he mutters. Then he shrugs. “Okay, look, I don’t know for sure, because Peter doesn’t actually tell me this shit, he just waits for me to notice he’s ruined my car seats again, but I don’t think he even maimed anyone.”

Stiles looks at him, and not just because Derek took approximately three seconds to select pulleys capable of taking on five hundred pounds when properly anchored. “He located my missing free-range, heritage-breed, custom-slaughter-date turkey and stopped it from being shipped to New Jersey. In seven hours.”

“Yeah,” Derek says. “Also, you named it. You don’t think that’s weird?”

“That I…gave it an identifier so when they sent me the weekly update email, I could pick its nesting box label out?” Stiles says.

“You named it Harris,” Derek says.

“Well, because this is my first Thanksgiving here since my family moved away and say what you will about the guy, he _did_ bring together your weird and my weird into one big, happy…um, big happy thing, and anyway, you’re trying to distract me from the Peter situation,” Stiles says. And maybe flails a bit unconsciously, so his arm knocks into the cart.

Derek hooks back the cart without looking. “There isn’t a Peter situation. I don’t think so, anyway,” he says. He seems uncomfortable for some reason, and not just because of his usual aversion to unpacking emotions. “He just sounded annoyed that the traffic was slowing him up, so I think he just went in, got your turkey, and turned around as fast as he could. I know him, I’m not going to pretend like he doesn’t turn up a lot of bodies, but he…wants to get back here more than he wants to do anything else, I think.”

“Because…Thanksgiving for me is turning into a thing, isn’t it?” Stiles says, biting back another sigh. He glances towards the end of the aisle, then back the way they came, wondering if whether he should just cut this expedition off and they make a last-minute stop to the supermarket for readymade platters instead. “I don’t want—this isn’t supposed to be a big deal. It really isn’t. Thanksgiving’s just—it’s Thanksgiving. It’s just the one day I’m used to having a break and that’s all Dad and I really do with it, and I’m not—if you need to do something, I’m not gonna—”

“Hi! So sorry, I forgot we were doing this, but then your dad came in and said you’d already left for the store.” Scott waves at them, jogging up the aisle, and then gives them another little apologetic hand-flap once he’s up to them. “I think we’re in a good place with the, um, other stuff.”

Derek isn’t surprised by Scott popping up at all, so obviously his hearing caught the man’s approach, but there’s more than a little bit of irritation in the way he grunts and just pushes the cart past Scott. Who never likes to leave things in a bad place even when he doesn’t even know what the beef is, but he aborts that instinctive turn towards Derek and instead looks at Stiles.

“I’m not too late, am I?” he says, starting to look a little wilted. “Sorry.”

“What, no, of course not,” Stiles says, because honestly, Scott’s sad-puppy face rivals the mind-tricks of the Valusian serpent-people for psychological potency. “We just got the pulleys, that’s it. Still a whole shopping list to go.”

“Oh, good! Okay,” Scott says, perking back up. “Great, I know you were really excited to see whether this is actually going to work and solve the oil-draining problem.”

“I…yeah. Yep, totally,” Stiles says.

He’s not bringing his A-game to this conversation, and they both know it. Scott’s perpetually optimistic but he’s a lot more observant than people give him credit for. Usually he’s just too polite to call anyone out, at least when no pacifistic ideals are on the line, and so they walk awkwardly over to the section with the cables and wires (since even though those are not in short supply, whether they can be sterilized to food-grade levels is…not a question anybody really wanted to answer for Stiles).

Derek pauses in the middle of test-pulling some cables when they reach him, but otherwise doesn’t look over. He seems pretty intent on it, and when Scott offers a suggestion, he grunts it off. Scott and Stiles share a look and then Scott smiles before Stiles can say anything about subvocal swear-words. And then they stand some more in silence.

Okay, this can’t keep going, Stiles thinks, preparing himself to be the one who turns it from implicitly to explicitly awkward. “So, I know it’s a cliché that the holidays are also the time of tense—”

“I know you’re not trying to get in the way or anything, and you’re really not,” Scott suddenly says. He glances at Stiles, rubbing at the side of his head, and then looks down at the ground. For all that he’s got Allison for a girlfriend and Melissa for a mom, and a first-of-its-kind avatar of a mutated Nemeton for a pet, Scott still has traces of the shy, deprecating kid who’d bonded with Stiles over mutual low social worth. “I mean, we might look busy, but it’s just—stuff that needs to be done just in case, and nobody’s hop—thinking we’re going to spend the entire weekend on it. And it’s not a big deal for me to—to skip. I mean, I’m not even skipping. We’ve got a whole pack on it and they don’t mind if I come help you for a bit.”

“Well, not if they can just guilt-trip you into extra favors later, right?” Stiles says.

Scott starts to deny that this happens, but Derek turns around and looks at him. The faintest flicker of irritation crosses Scott’s face. He presses his lips together and Derek suddenly smirks, tossing his chosen cables into the cart. So Scott blinks, a little confused, and then decides to let it go as Derek turns back around and starts…testing more cables.

“It’s mostly just Cora and Erica these days, and I can deal with that,” Scott mutters. Then he grimaces. “Okay, to be honest, Allison deals with that.”

“She seems cool with it,” Stiles points out. “I’ve never heard her complain about having to carry extra taser batteries, is all I’m saying.”

“Yeah, well—” Scott says, looking a little worriedly at Derek “—I think she just wants to make sure there aren’t any misunderstandings about who’s doing what job, since we did have some of those issues back when we started scheduling joint patrols—”

“No, she just likes knocking Cora out,” Derek says without looking back. “Who usually deserves it, Scott. Laura and I know the difference between that and an Argent going nuts again.”

Scott grimaces again, and honestly, Stiles isn’t all that sure that Derek’s comment isn’t hiding some unresolved grudges. But Derek’s body language seems loose, as far as Stiles’ human senses can tell, and Scott might have an unusually strong belief in peacemaking for a werewolf, but he also feels just as strongly about keeping bystanders out of fights and he isn’t trying to move between Stiles and Derek. So maybe this is…not the issue that needs to be straightened out right now.

“I know you don’t mind,” Stiles tells Scott. “I guess I just want—this isn’t a big deal for me. The turkey and the meal stuff and…I’m really just here to hang out, that’s all. Nothing ever happens on Thanksgiving, and when I say nothing, I mean nothing. It’s not a big celebration in Arkham either, it’s just…time off. So if you just want to hang in between things, that’s fine with me.”

He thinks he gets that out pretty well, just natural and calm and matter-of-fact, but Scott looks at him for what seems like a second longer than necessary. But before Stiles can start to think about maybe it being a tell for werewolf senses only, Scott nods and puts his hand on the cart handle. “I think that works. There really isn’t anything planned, honestly. We just are doubling the patrol team size for a couple days and, um, carrying a couple extra things when we go out, but we’re pretty flexible too. So we can just see how it goes?”

“Sure,” Stiles says. “Like I said, I don’t really have anything else on my schedule.”

Scott relaxes. He asks Stiles what else is on the shopping list and Stiles shows him, and for a few minutes they chat about what size propane tank would be a good idea. Stiles has run some calculations about oil volume and speed of consumption but Scott has thoughts about how much of a margin to leave in, apparently spurred by a failed attempt at a group barbecue back in the day.

“And I know it wasn’t because we used up some on the darach, because the store checked the gauges when I was returning the bottles and we still had a quarter left in that one,” he explains. He’s getting a little bit animated, and then he visibly reins himself in as he remembers Stiles isn’t the one perpetuating that argument. “I really think it was because the drumsticks were so thick. Boyd picked out the biggest ones he could find, but I don’t think they thawed out all the way.”

“Yeah, that’s a problem, but adding more blast heat isn’t going to fix it,” Stiles says, redoing some calculations on his phone. “On the other hand, density needs to be factored in anyway and you know, ugh, I forgot to ask Peter to take breast measurements. I’m pretty sure I used a standard turkey in my model but the breed I got’s supposed to be less white, more dark, and…damn it, I’m gonna have to redo these.”

“So do you need to pick up more oil?” Scott says. Then he shakes his head. “Wait, no, it’s actually be the other way because the volume is less, right?”

“Um, not necessarily, density isn’t thickness, so that variable might actually hold even…” Stiles mumbles, frowning at his phone. Then he looks up and catches Scott leaning in to look too.

Scott twitches, then ducks his head, embarrassed. “Sorry. This just—this is kind of fun. I mean, we haven’t really done a big group meal like this since high school graduation and we didn’t really get to eat much of that, what with…Mom’s really looking forward to this. She’s been trying to pick a potato recipe for weeks.”

“She knows whatever she makes, Dad and I will eat it even if we have to murder somebody to get our share,” Stiles says. Then, as Scott struggles not to look reproachful, he grins and slings his arm over the other man’s shoulders. “Kidding, kidding. That’s what non-Euclidean pocket dimensions are for—okay, also kidding. Seriously, I was trying to minimize how much cooking your mom does for us this trip.”

“She likes it,” Scott says, shrugging. He lets Stiles squeeze him for a couple seconds, then gently ducks out from under Stiles’ arm. “No, really, I know what you mean. I used to try and talk her into at least letting me order food for her, because the messes we get into take up her time too, but…I think she just likes being able to do something for people that doesn’t involve crimes, or…you know.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I do. So okay, I’m not going to turn down her potatoes, but we really gotta keep her to just one side dish,” Stiles says. Which Scott completely agrees with, says his determined nod, and so they can go…wait for Derek, who is still tugging at cables. “Hey—”

“It’s extra for Peter,” Derek says, finally coming over, with another coil slung over his shoulder. “He usually runs out, and then he’s going to borrow from you.”

That last part’s to Scott, who looks long-suffering. “Probably a good idea.”

“Right, okay,” Stiles says, _not_ asking. “So, then…onwards towards Turkey Day.”

* * *

With hardware in hand and a last swing by the supermarket, Stiles and Derek and Scott get back to Stiles’ dad’s rental just in time to meet Peter, who is the proud bearer of one mostly-thawed turkey.

“I don’t see you can’t just magic it unfrozen,” Cora says, eyeballing the bird as it rests in a large plastic tub in the laundry room, surrounded by Stiles’ jury-rigged ventilation system. “There’s got to be a spell for that, so we aren’t blowing the smell of fresh Butterball out the dryer vent and across the neighborhood. Every dog for a mile around’s going to be parked outside.”

That, admittedly, is a good point, and not one Stiles had considered (Arkham is mostly a cat-person town) when he’d been trying to figure out how to speed-thaw the thing without the _house_ smelling like turkey. “I—”

“Am not going to squander hundreds of dollars of rare ingredients on a meal that you’re going to gulp down in two minutes on your way to stealing my equally expensive wine for your post-fight party,” Peter snaps, as he snuggles up behind Stiles. When Stiles puts one hand back and gropes towards his abs, he makes a happy noise. And then pushes his head over Stiles’ shoulder and snarls at Cora. “Which is why you’re first on dog duty. Boyd will relieve you in an hour.”

“What?” Cora says, eyes widening. “Wait, what the hell, since when was this a—”

Peter snarls again. Cora looks mulish but she shuts up. She checks her pocket for her phone, then stomps out into the garage, grumbling about overbearing uncles and their sociopathic attitude towards food.

“‘Dog duty’?” Stiles asks. “Not that I don’t appreciate, ‘cause you know I do, but…I was under the impression that Laura’s pack had more pressing things to do than fend off the neighborhood strays.”

“Oh, no doubt that they’ve gotten into some mess or the other, but I’m sure they can spare my niece for a few hours,” Peter purrs, as his fingertips inch their way down the seams of Stiles’ pants. He slots his nose in behind Stiles’ left ear and breathes in, then lets out a long lick of an exhale that lays down a warm, moist trail into Stiles’ shirt-collar. “Besides, they’re always forgetting to guard their base and God knows there’s no point in winning the fight if you can’t come home after to shower off the blood.”

Peter is very pleased with himself, and when he’s pleased with himself, he usually wants sex. And Stiles generally doesn’t mind obliging, especially when the man’s pressed up against Stiles’ back and making _those_ noises, but…he pins Peter’s wrists halfway down his hips. Then turns around, pushing Peter back into the wall as he goes so the man’s got something to keep purring over, and nuzzles Peter’s collarbone the way he knows will get him an instant shudder.

“Hmmm, okay, fair,” he murmurs. He shifts his thigh forward, pushing up against Peter’s groin, and concentrates. The nice thing about baggy pants is they leave room for certain below-the-belt maneuvers that otherwise would be difficult even with extra muscles, and…right on cue, Peter groans hungrily into Stiles’ ear. “Definitely know my main motivation for fights is how fast I get to my ginger-scented body wash after.”

“Oh, don’t be ridiculous, you know damn well I’d rather have your mouth over any body wash,” Peter says, trying to catch Stiles’ mouth.

His hands are twitching, too. Stiles dodges the kiss but placates Peter with a good, long suck up the neck tendons. “Uh, huh, right, says the guy who has natural immunity to blood-borne diseases. I mean, sure, Miskatonic’s got stuff for that too, but then I have to explain to them just how it came up.”

“And you don’t want to admit it was in the middle of fucking a werewolf?” Peter asks. Very low, very languid, wielding that voice of his as if it’s connected directly to the nerve center in Stiles’ body that controls all the shivers (which, honestly, it kind of does). “In your father’s bathroom? Congratulating him on—”

“Yeah?” Stiles breathes. Leaning his weight against Peter, a little dizzy now but doing his damnedest to keep his mind on the plan and not (entirely) on the admittedly hot, well-muscled, super-willing man who’s flicking his fingertips at Stiles’ fly. “Okay, congrats. For…”

Peter hitches his hips, making them both groan as their bodies briefly align with the _perfect_ degree and slant of pressure. Then tilts his head so that his lips are just brushing the tip of Stiles’ nose as he speaks. “For…picking up a turkey. Stiles.”

“Yeah, that’s—” Stiles grabs his mind out of its sexual haze “—and what else?”

“And…remembering the giblets,” Peter says. “So you can get that full-bodied flavor in the sauce.”

He’s still using the same sex voice and Stiles is seriously never going to look at gravy the same way again, but—Stiles makes himself pull back. The corners of Peter’s mouth are curving up but he’s watching Stiles with an alertness that doesn’t jibe with the lazy undulation of his body. He also isn’t surprised to be caught.

“I’m just—” Stiles starts.

“I didn’t kill anyone, Stiles,” Peter says, his tone just this side of the toleration-resignation divide. He tilts his head back and looks at Stiles through his lashes, and for one second, he’s thinking about using sex as a distraction. And then he sighs and moves his hands up to Stiles’ waist. “Or maim, or blackmail, or even significantly threaten.”

Stiles pauses with his mouth open.

“Demonstrating to them that I am fully-versed in USDA regulations isn’t threatening them, it’s just being a concerned citizen,” Peter says. A little more amused about it, but still poised to slide away if he needs to. “Not that I wasn’t tempted, but your timetable was already compressed and I just didn’t see the value of wasting more time there.”

“Yeah. I mean, I appreciate that.” Which comes out about as convincing as a block of tofu on a burger bun. Stiles grimaces and starts to pep himself up, thinking he could at least sound more enthusiastic, and then he catches the way Peter’s scanning his face. He stops, then bites his lip. Then flips up the hem of Peter’s shirt and slips his hands under it.

Peter’s pupils dilate and he takes a long breath that quivers his belly against Stiles’ fingers. And then he firmly pushes Stiles back. “Stiles, you really don’t—”

“I mean that I appreciate you’re prioritizing me above everything else, and believe me, I get what kind of sacrifice that is. I’m not—I’m trying not to be that kind of hypocrite that gets turned on by the amoral stuff and then tries to weasel out of the consequences,” Stiles says. He lets Peter shift him back, but keeps his palms under Peter’s shirt. “Sure, the paperwork is painful, but if it’s gotta be done, it’s gotta be done. I’ll figure out the turkey one way or the other.”

“And I appreciate your open mind on these sorts of things,” Peter says after a long moment. Calm but not so studied that he’s trying to cover up his own mood. He’s got that slight pinch between his brows that means he’s thinking, but he’s not really giving off confused vibes. Just…thoughtful. “But contrary to public opinion, I don’t actually love homicide. It’s a necessity that I just don’t feel guilt over acknowledging—well, sometimes. Sometimes, Stiles, it’s just more of a delay than it’s worth.”

“So you just wanted to make it back here, with everything we’ve got planned?” Stiles says.

Peter picks up the little inflection and snorts. “If Laura or Scott’s dragged you into some kind of charitable mission, then I’m more than happy to have a word.”

“Um, no, actually, they’re pretty big on keeping me out of it,” Stiles mutters, startled enough that he relaxes his arms. Before he knows it, Peter’s closed that gap and then some, warm palms slipping down past Stiles’ waistband. “Okay, look, I, um, I just wanted to make sure, _okay_ , I’m trying to be meaningful here but it’s honestly hard to do that with that kind of grip—”

“So get yourself out of it,” Peter says, shrugging carelessly. 

He smirks at Stiles’ narrowed eyes, and by the time Stiles has pushed them out of the room and into the hall, Peter’s humming happily. The man _knows_ what happens every time he makes comments like that about Stiles’ unique—Peter kisses Stiles, still so _pleased_ with himself, and Stiles gives them another shove to get them into the guest bedroom, so at least nobody’s going to walk in on him giving Peter a piece of his mind.

Which eventually happens. After they’ve gotten naked and onto the bed, and Peter’s licked and sucked his cock to attention and then sat on it and talked some _more_ about how much he loves Stiles’ special muscular abilities. He even throws in a bunch of anatomical terms from Stiles’ last physical and uses them correctly and everything, and at that point, Stiles gives up on conversation and just tries to make Peter shut up. A lot.

“Which is just giving you what you want, and why is it I can tell what you’re doing but you still _do_ it to me?” Stiles mumbles into Peter’s pectoral.

“Mmmm, possibly because you also want it?” Peter says. He arches lazily under Stiles, his heel dragging along Stiles’ calf, and then settles into the mattress. One of his hands fingers a couple blossoming sore spots on Stiles’ neck (anybody who thinks getting fucked means Peter doesn’t like shows of possession deserves to end up in a Miskatonic reanimation capsule). “You do want things, Stiles, and it’s perfectly healthy. _And_ I know you’re going to point that I’m not necessarily a trustworthy source for that kind of statement, but I think I know what it’s like to want, in all its shapes and forms.”

A slight edge comes into Peter’s voice at the end. It’s not for or against Stiles, and he can tell that because when he raises his head, Peter’s face twitches a little and then doesn’t change. Peter could have pretended that didn’t slip out, and he’s good at it; he doesn’t do that so much around Stiles anymore, but he does still tense up every time he’s referenced some of that loaded history he and everyone else in Beacon Hills seems to have. 

“I wouldn’t say trust is the appropriate caveat here,” Stiles says, and is rewarded with a brow-lift from Peter. He rubs his fingers along Peter’s jawline, dragging them a little under the chin where the muscles have to morph the most to wolf out, and Peter’s chest rumbles with a purr that doesn’t quite escape his mouth. “You’re an interested party, sure, but then we’re talking about possible bias, and there’s still some space between that and straight-out lying.”

“I do wish Miskatonic would export that Unreliable Narrators course,” Peter says after a moment. He twists his head, just as Stiles’ fingers come near, and briefly catches a fingertip between his lips. No teeth at all, just soft press and the smallest flick of a tongue, and then he leans back, smiling. “That kind of perspective would be useful in all sorts of environments.”

“Okay, let’s remember that that course is pass/fail and also only goes through unreliable narrators who aren’t you,” Stiles mutters. “Dad’s been arguing for five years that you shouldn’t _have_ to declare a Non-Standard Psych major in order to take the one about unreliable first-person POV.”

“Very true. But on the other hand, I can see the value in making people self-screen their psychoses,” Peter points out. “That way you can filter all of the ones who are terrible at it and think they’re going to learn to not be terrible.”

Stiles makes a face. “You sound _exactly_ like the department chair.”

Peter’s expression changes slightly. His legs shift and Stiles thinks he wants to wiggle out, and starts to lever himself up. But instead Peter slings one leg back across Stiles’ thighs, then reaches up and fits his hand to the side of Stiles’ face.

“I wanted to get you your turkey because I enjoy when you’re enjoying yourself far more than I enjoy dealing with idiots. Even if I get to kill them, it’s still just…compensation,” Peter says simply. His thumb brushes along Stiles’ hairline. “Did something happen? You don’t seem to be enjoying yourself.”

“What? No, I mean—we just had sex!” Stiles says.

“Well, yes, and it _was_ good, wasn’t it?” Peter murmurs, back to his usual cock-baiting self. For all of a second, before he’s studying Stiles again. “What happened?”

“Nothing,” Stiles says. Then repositions himself on Peter, who he think just twitched his eyes over to the hall door (which means Peter’s mentally calculating which pack member he needs to corner). “No, really, nothing, it’s just—it’s just the first one and I just—we’re just figuring out how we’re going to get everything done. And _not_ because anyone asked me to help out with whoever is causing trouble, because they really haven’t, Peter. I’m just trying to—to do this Thanksgiving thing. It’s usually just me and Dad, so this is—this is new. But it’s okay, really. I mean, turkey’s on track and everything, with a ten-minute margin left, and you know I can do a _lot_ with ten minutes.”

Peter looks at him, lips pressed together, nostrils not quite flaring in a way that means he’s deliberately not trying to sniff out Stiles’ emotions. Stiles really means it, though: he’s not trying to sneak something by Peter, even if he’s trying to rush getting Peter to believe him because sure, he accepts that Peter is Peter and Peter’s going to make up his own mind about what’s an acceptable ratio of physical-to-emotional trauma in any given situation, but he also wants to not make this holiday more complicated for anyone.

Honestly, he thinks, he just want to make the damn turkey. If he gets that done, he’ll call it a win.

For another couple seconds, Peter eyes him, and Stiles starts to wonder if he should just call it and go back to assembling the turkey rig. But then the other man relaxes and nods, and _that_ is his thumb nudging up behind Stiles’ balls. “This is true,” he says with mock-sagacity, as Stiles hisses and hitches and of course gives Peter exactly the push in that the other man was waiting for, with that slow, satisfied-yet-not clench around Stiles’ dick. “Ten minutes is quite a lot of time.”

“Um—oh, right, dinner,” Stiles says, belatedly remembering. “Um—”

“In ten minutes,” Peter says, right before rolling them over again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lovecraft's original stories actually do account for normal people reactions from time to time, since the police do end up interviewing people and in at least _The Thing on the Doorstep_ , people end up in insane asylums and also worry about being charged with murder because they're inconveniently in possession of a body. That said, law enforcement is still weirdly accommodating of the weirdness, considering his stories _also_ span the same time as Prohibition and the rise of modern organized crime. Providence was a Mafia epicenter and wasn't nearly as small-town naive as you'd think.
> 
> H.P. Lovecraft was a die-hard cat person. Strangely, this hasn't been picked up nearly as much in the Cthulhu Mythos as you'd think, and instead people have gone with canine influences like the Hounds of Tindalos.
> 
> I did appreciate how Derek (at least in the first few seasons) was portrayed as not a complete idiot. He got suckered in by both Peter's and Jennifer's lies, but as soon as he was presented with contrary evidence, he considered it and was willing to change his mind. His tendencies to get himself into trouble seem to stem more out of unconscious self-destructive urges (loneliness, guilt, etc.) rather than genuinely thinking his choices are good choices. And Peter gets himself into trouble when he lets his love of the game overtake his actual goals. Having them fixate on figuring out Stiles' unique methods of communicating helps them avoid those pitfalls. Not that Stiles notices.


	3. Chapter 3

Dinner before Thanksgiving is pretty simple, since both Stiles and Melissa are trying to save fridge space for actual holiday fixings. Everybody goes over to Melissa’s place and sits down to a make-your-own taco spread, and tries to not talk about why they all have suspicious bulges in their clothes and can’t help jumping whenever someone’s phone alarm goes off.

“All right, that’s it,” Melissa finally says, going out of the room. She comes back a couple minutes later with a large shoebox, which she uses to collect everyone’s phones. Even Chris’ phone (though Laura gives Peter a half-hearted kick under the table when he sniggers). “We all know what we’ve got to look out for, but right now, we’re having a meal. I think we can stand to talk to each other instead of DMing for thirty minutes.”

Erica mimes setting a timer and earns a dirty look from Allison. Then she sits up straight and innocent-faced as Melissa straightens up from putting the shoebox down and picks up a plate of flan and…walks straight past a now-disappointed Erica to offer it to a very bemused Peter.

“John tells me you’re thinking of working as an adjunct professor for Miskatonic next semester,” she says.

Peter stops looking bemused and starts looking annoyed. Then clearly realizes that that’d have to be directed at Stiles’ dad, who is currently in the kitchen helping Scott extract extra tortilla packs from the fridge, and rearranges his expression to politely disinterested. “Nothing’s set in stone,” he says, declining the flan. “And even if it was, I’m not entirely sure I can agree to their terms.”

“What, I thought sociopathy was a selling point over there,” Cora says, from where she’s scowling beside Erica.

“But then he’s gotta lock down his reincarnations and aside from Stiles there, we all know Peter doesn’t commit to anything he can’t blackmail or bury,” Erica pipes up.

“Maybe that’s because he actually pays attention to what’s going to get you on the FBI’s Most Wanted list, if it wasn’t for Melissa cleaning up everybody’s records,” Stiles snaps.

Erica blinks hard, though she’s really got no reason to be surprised. If anything, Stiles should be making that face, since he thought he and Erica had a reasonable, arm’s-length, we-both-know-I-can-make-this-messy respect for each other. For all her snark, she also usually keeps her disses out of his earshot these days. Cora, not so much, but the Hales have repeatedly demonstrated that being nice to each other is considered immediate grounds for a full-blown exorcism.

“Then again, I can give you your phone back,” Melissa says, eyeing the two women. She stands back, hand on hip, as Cora perks up (Erica is slightly warier, though she also looks up), and then sets the flan down on the table by Stiles. “And you can go ahead and meet Parrish for the first sweep rather than Scott and Isaac. If that’s all right with you, Laura.”

Laura looks like she’d rather eat her taco, but she manages to swallow down her irritation and straighten her shoulders. “Normally I’d object to screwing with the patrol plan one hour before we go alive, since as _someone_ told me last week, that’s counterproductive for team dynamics, but if Peter wants to work for people who think an eighty-six percent undergraduate survival rate’s great, well, he’s an adult.”

“I appreciate your respect for my well-being and autonomy, niece,” Peter drawls.

At that point, Stiles’ dad comes out of the kitchen with the tortillas and Derek immediately raises his hand for some. Seeing as Derek still has a half-eaten taco on his plate, that’s probably more about getting out from between Peter and Cora, but he heaps up so much meat on the new tortillas that he basically empties the bowl. Which Stiles takes as his cue to rotate into the kitchen.

“Oh, we’re out?” Scott says, pausing in the doorway with a tub of salsa in his hands. “I can get more—or do you think we should get more dessert?”

Stiles glances over his shoulder. “Dessert, definitely.”

“You sure? You don’t think the refried beans?” Scott says, frowning. And then, before Stiles can explain what he missed, he points to his right ear. “I know, but even Laura usually gets less cranky when she’s got enough carbs.”

“Well, if you didn’t have to roll out of here and onto patrol, I’d say yeah, but you probably want people sharp,” Stiles says. “Just not…”

“On each other,” Scott says, sounding weary. He pops the lid back onto the salsa and hands it to Stiles, then grabs a second flan from the counter. “If you could put that back, that’d be great, and also give you a minute if you need one. I’ll go in and…talk to them.”

Stiles gives his buddy, who’s got his best determined face on, a pat on the back and then feels absolutely no shame about standing back and letting Scott at it. Everybody’s got their own strengths and Scott is a total champion at thinking he’s going to stop the war of the egos. 

Meanwhile, Stiles is going to put the salsa away, take a beat, and then come in as back-up once Scott’s gotten everyone focused on how annoyed they are with him, because he’s not a total wimp (he just is very aware at this point of how bad he is in trying to figure out what’s just regular sniping and what’s real bad blood with this group). He…

He is still staring at the fridge when Melissa comes into the kitchen about a minute later. “Here, let me give you a hand with that,” she says. Then reaches past him when he turns, does some kind of match-three trick with the boxes stuffing the shelves, and comes up with a slot just big enough to fit the salsa container. “Not that this is the only reason I’m glad this’ll all come out tomorrow, but I’m also looking forward to being able to see the milk again.”

“You know, we could…give you some tips for that. Making room, I mean,” Stiles says. “Just a matter of applied geometry.”

“Oh, your dad’s already offered, but I don’t want to encourage those bottomless pits,” Melissa says with a smile, nodding at the other room. “Especially now that they’ve all got their own places, they should be learning to cook enough for their own leftovers rather than scavenging like the coyotes on the highway.”

Melissa’s got half an armful of empty plates and as she talks, she carries them over to the sink. She’s too fast for Stiles to offer to help, but once she gets there, she realizes someone’s removed the sponge from its dish. He mumbles under his breath, then darts for the small blue glow in the corner.

“Okay, fair,” he says while deactivating the location spell. He hands her the sponge and then swipes the dishwashing detergent while she’s taking it, because Melissa is amazing but that’s just how his dad raised him. Then digs the plug out from under the dishes and inserts into the drain, and starts filling up the free side of the sink with water. “Don’t look at me like that, a crust that thick is definitely going to need a soak, and I’m guessing you’re gonna decline my offer of all-purpose stain remover.”

“Actually, I wouldn’t be so sure about that one,” Melissa says, though she’s stepping back with an amused look on her face. “I am pretty jealous of your father’s stocks where that’s concerned. Not—” she raises a hand “—that I want to know how to make my own, because he already tried to tell me and listen, if it’s one thing I’ve learned as coroner in this town, it’s that knowing when to _not_ know how something gets done is just as important.”

Once the water’s hit the halfway point, Stiles gives the detergent bottle two healthy squeezes and then swishes his hand around till he gets a good foamy top. “That one’s actually one of the formulations the regents thought was safe for public knowledge, you know. They filed a patent on it.”

Melissa blinks, surprised. Starts to say something, then catches herself and thinks a second. “And when was this, exactly? Back when they knew nobody was really reading the things and was just rubberstamping them?”

It’s Stiles’ turn to look startled. Which makes her laugh and come back up to him, patting his shoulder as a way to edge him over enough so that she can be the one stacking the dishes in the soapy water.

“You and your dad, you two think you can slide the same little things by people,” she says, shaking her head. “I caught him trying to game the resumes for the new deputy slot. Not, Stiles, that we couldn’t use good candidates so Jordan and Tara can finally take a vacation, but it’s just this thing where you don’t seem to think we’ll take it the right way if you just tell us what you’re doing.”

“Well, you all do complain a lot about how much work it is to keep the sheriff in line, and Dad does know a lot of people in the field at some point,” Stiles says. He puts the detergent down and moves the tap over to wash off some that’s gotten on his hands. “Also, he knows the sane ones.”

“I know, I know, but he could just put them on my desk. He doesn’t have to sneak them into my bag like if I knew he liked them, I’d throw them in the trash,” Melissa says. Then she stops and frowns down into the sink as something shifts around with a muffled clinking noise. She flicks aside some of the bubbles, then reaches in and adjusts the stack of dishes. “Nobody’s been giving you two trouble about interfering with our business, have they? Because that’s ridiculous. Your father’s paying property tax, you’re both on our back-up contacts list, and Scott mentioned the other day that you were lending him freezer space. Which, by the way, is very nice of you, but you really don’t have to, Stiles.”

“Yeah, I know, but he was in my neighborhood and I had the room, and I know he wanted to get back in time for his weekly dinner with you,” Stiles says, drying off his hands. He’s starting to see where this is going. “Besides, what are besties for, if not for taking incriminating evidence off your hands so they can test out their ideas for obfuscating time of death analytical methods?”

Melissa gives him a glance that is not exactly disapproving-parent, even though it’s not entirely on board. In return, Stiles gives her his best eager-student grin. She hesitates, then sighs. She starts to say something, only to stop as he offers her the towel.

She’d totally been going to start scrubbing the dishes, but she knows he’s onto her. “Just so long as you know that it’s not all about us,” she says, reluctantly taking the towel and rubbing it over her hand. “You’re not consultants we’ve hired. I know it might look a lot like we want things done a certain way, but that’s just…trying to stay ahead of the chaos all the time. It’s not like if you speak up about something, we’re going to tell you to shut up. At least not when I’m around.”

“I know. I mean, we know—Dad totally knows too, and I’m sure that’s why he wants to get you good help, so you don’t have to work so hard at that,” Stiles says. His hands are still a little damp but he doesn’t want to take the towel back from her, so he presses them against his jeans. “We’re just trying to help. You know, if you need it. Because if you don’t, that’s okay too, and—”

“Don’t tell me the werewolves have brainwashed you into their ideas about maintaining territory,” Melissa says, turning to face Stiles. “Because fine, they have instincts and all, but they also have brains. And as far as I can tell, all the ones in this town like being alive more than they like having territory, no matter what they’re saying to you.”

“No, it’s not from them, this is all me,” Stiles says without thinking. Then bites his lip as Melissa’s gaze sharpens. “I mean…really. I just—Dad and I just…want to be here. You know? It’s not really about doing things. I mean, it doesn’t have to be, and I was just thinking the turkey would be fun and when I mentioned it, Scott said it did sound really tasty and that usually none of you have time to cook one and…”

Melissa’s still looking really hard at him, but her expression is changing. At first he thinks she’s going to cry, which makes _no_ sense whatsoever with her, but then she drops the towel on the counter with a loud splat and reaches out to cup his cheeks, smiling but looking like it hurts. 

“Stiles, the turkey’s fine,” she says. She pauses, her hands dropping to his shoulders, and then gives those a little squeeze. “If you want to have a big dinner, that’s fine. You’re not interrupting anything, all right? Believe me, it’s not just the holiday. We’re like this _all_. The. Time. There is no good time, so stop worrying about that. There’s just time we can make for people we care about, and you’re one of them. All right?”

“I—yeah. I mean, definitely. I mean…yeah,” Stiles says, because man, but his reputation for having not just a perfect line but a perfect synopsis goes down the drain whenever Melissa starts in on him. “I—okay. Okay, thanks. I’ll—so Dad and I’ll take care of the food.”

“Good,” Melissa says. Her smile looks a little less pained. She gives his right shoulder another pat, then pushes on his left to make him turn. “So go on back in there. Go talk with Scott and the rest of them. Chris is already sneaking around to get the dishes so you don’t need to worry about it.”

Stiles blinks, then looks up over Melissa’s shoulder and catches Chris doing his best cat-caught-mid-scratching-up-your-shit impression in the other doorway, extra dish sponge in hand. Then looks back at Melissa, who is outright smirking. “You sure you don’t want Dad? He usually has a little bottle of stain remover on him.”

“Well…” Melissa contemplates the dishes “…all right, I’ll take that. But that’s it, Stiles. I want you to stop worrying and relax. It’s supposed to be your holiday break, too.”

“Okay, okay,” Stiles says, putting up his hands in surrender. “Got it.”

* * *

Stiles suspects Melissa must have done something with everybody else, too (maybe calling the group out via mass text), because when he goes back into the living room, the sarcasm’s gone back to a bitter simmer and the occasional pout from Cora. After dessert’s done and the people who are on first patrol shift have left, _Laura_ even suggests that they play a game, and _Derek_ not only participates, he creams everyone at Cards Against Humanity.

“I freelanced in the entertainment industry for years,” he mutters when he, Peter, and Stiles are in bed later that night.

“Which showed you the whole rainbow of assholery?” Stiles says. He’s got some kind of bedsheet wrinkle digging into his buttock, and a werewolf snuggling his leg so he can’t just roll over.

Derek also doesn’t want to move, but when Stiles accidentally kicks him trying to yank the sheet straight, he grunts and gets up. He gets almost to the edge of the bed before the bedsheet Stiles is now frantically trying to loop around him registers. He looks up through slitted eyes, processes, and then grumpily climbs back to where Stiles can toss the blanket back over him. 

“No, that’s when I started to realize how much more of an asshole people in this town are,” he says, right before planting his face into the pillow.

Werewolf healing does _not_ address a lack of air, so Stiles tugs at the pillow till Derek rolls his head just enough to show a little sliver of nose. Of course, that means Peter makes disgruntled noises because Stiles is pulling away from him, but a quick backhanded scratch to the abs settles that werewolf.

The other one’s one eye is warily considering him, and Stiles suddenly realizes Derek probably was listening in on the kitchen talk with Melissa, plus had talked to Peter at some point about the movie. And Peter’s been trying to play lowkey all night, but that’s exactly what should have tipped Stiles off: the lack of drama. They’re trying so hard to not ruin this for him, and for a second he’s about to sit up and have it out with them then and there, because he had honestly thought they were _past_ this.

But then…maybe it’s Melissa puncturing his self-obsessed bubble—okay, it’s definitely that. Because she’d framed it as being all about how he didn’t need to work so hard to fit in and just needed to relax, but the flip side of that is that they really _do_ have their own lives, and don’t need that interrupted by his mangsting over minor holiday fripperies. 

Derek and Peter probably have been trying to figure him out all evening, Stiles thinks, and when Derek’s visible eye narrows slightly in suspicion, Stiles does his best to ignore the tightness in his chest and just pulls the blankets into a little dip between himself and Derek. That way, if he ends up clamping onto the mattress like usual, he won’t take all the covers with him.

“You’re definitely on my team next time,” Stiles says, snuggling down into the bed. “Like I told Erica, rematch at Christmas, and between you and Lydia, I think we have it locked.”

“I’m not playing on her team, she makes us buy her new fucking shoes every time we save her life,” Derek is saying as Stiles drifts off. And that’s just him being him, and Stiles is going to shut up and let that happen.

* * *

The next morning, Stiles is more than a little surprised to lift his head and watch Peter’s and Derek’s bodies slowly come into focus. What’s more, based on the state of their hair, it’s highly unlikely that either of them had sneaked out in the middle of the night to do anything (or at least anything more strenuous than hitting the bathroom, since Peter is pathologically unable to go to bed dirty if hot water is available). They’re trying really, really hard at this.

So Stiles is going to try too. He squirms out of bed—Peter grunts and cracks open an eye, then promptly rolls into the warm spot Stiles left once he realizes what time it is—and tiptoes around to collect his clothes and his phone. Then grabs breakfast and goes out into the backyard, where he finds his father tampering with his frying rig.

“I’m not tampering, kid, I’m just making sure that we don’t actually have to collect on my renters’ insurance policy,” his dad says, while redoing Stiles’ pulleys.

“Dad, I had those scaled for twice the actual turkey weight,” Stiles says. “Three times. Using two different weights to calibrate and—and also? It is _four in the morning_. Even Peter doesn’t want to wake up, and he is _all_ about doing things at times that earn you a presumption of shadiness.”

Stiles’ dad looks over his shoulder at Stiles. Then drops his eyes to Stiles’ arms, which, okay, are holding his phone, a welder’s mask, a blowtorch, a bag of screws, and three boxes of catering-size aluminum foil. But it’s _Stiles’_ rig.

“It wasn’t going to blow up anything. Or breach a dimension. Or even leak,” Stiles can’t help saying two minutes later, when his dad finally steps away from the fryer.

“So you just have all that stuff because you had a brain wave and realized if you reoriented the ball bearings, you could get a better three-sixty fry,” his father says dryly.

“That being a true statement does _not_ make my statements false,” Stiles manages to say after a second. 

His dad snorts and comes back up to the porch, grabbing up a rag from a bucket of them to wipe his hands. He stifles a yawn into the back of his wrist, rubs one eye, and then pulls his phone out. “Shit, it _is_ four in the morning.”

Stiles looks at him.

“I figured that’d take me a good thirty minutes longer. When you tried the same set-up that time up in Maine, it took us three hours,” his dad says. “Guess having a screwdriver that doesn’t keep trying to convince me to kill people makes all the difference.”

“Okay, first, I wasn’t frying something, I was trying to lower a bucket into an ancient Deep One-made blowhole that kept kinking things around one-eighty degrees. Second, I _told_ you and the assistant librarian told you to go with the Allen wrench, but no, you insisted that murder was a lot easier to resist than scamming people,” Stiles says. He dumps all of his tools onto a nearby table and stalks out into the yard to look over his dad’s work. Which, annoyingly, is just fine. Because his dad’s really good. Because…he spins back around. “And third—have you been out here for three hours?”

“No, son, I just said it didn’t take me as long,” his father says, frowning. As if he hasn’t just completely given himself away.

Stiles gives up on the rig—the thing has to be recalibrated again but that’s because it can now take a hundred pounds in seven different dimensions, which means he has to go back in and get some extra stuff anyway—and stomps back up to his dad. “Okay, what did you do to annoy Melissa and when are you going to apologize for it?”

“Wait—what?” his dad says, blinking.

“You annoyed her, obviously,” Stiles says, gesturing at the house. Then he realizes Melissa’s place is actually behind him and reverses his arm. “There’s no way she would have let you putter around at this hour unless you did something.”

“Kid,” Stiles’ dad starts, obviously about to drop a truth-bomb or two.

Stiles rethinks the evidence, then snaps his fingers. “Oh! No, okay, you haven’t even _talked_. So something’s up but you can’t do anything so you’re improving my turkey fryer because I teamed up with your staff to lock you out of your email till Sunday night.”

Judging from the way his dad screws up his face but doesn’t say anything, just fiddles with his phone, that’s right on target. And…Stiles doesn’t actually feel accomplished or anything like that. His father might not be teasing him anymore, but now the man has that resigned expression he gets whenever someone hands him a report on the latest freshman to think “accidentally” being locked in at night with the unabridged Prague printing of the _Necronomicron_ is going to solve all of their GPA issues. Which, honestly, Stiles sympathizes with.

“It’s not bad, is it?” Stiles finally asks.

“What? No,” Stiles’ father says, twitching sharply. He glances at his phone, but that’s clearly something somebody’s recently warned him off from, given how he immediately grimaces. Then he looks up and meets Stiles’ gaze, and sighs. “No, everything’s fine, son. There was a ping on the alarm system and they’re out looking at it, but I don’t think it’s serious. Melissa made Chris leave the sniper rifle.”

Of course, he says that, but his eyes drift back to his phone. Stiles takes a peek and discovers his dad watching a cluster of little green dots circling around a purple one. “Well, if they’re that close to one of the saplings, I’m gonna be surprised if the Nemeton left enough for a full set of forensics to be run.”

“I think that’s why Melissa ran out, honestly. She has a harder time planting appropriate DNA evidence if there is no DNA,” Stiles’ dad says, mouth twisting wryly. His thumb hovers over the bottom of the screen, then abruptly jerks away from the home button, and then he leans forward and drops his arm around Stiles’ shoulder. “Well, I did leave it to you to calibrate the thing.”

“Because that’s totally the best part, calibration,” Stiles deadpans.

His dad laughs, and squeezes them together. So maybe the laugh trails off a bit and his dad’s eyes pause on the far end of the backyard, in the direction of Melissa’s house, but it’s genuine enough. “Or I can do that too, and you can start on that three-page list I saw you had for the post-fry seasoning.”

“Okay, now you’re just—you can’t just snake the whole frying process from me, Dad,” Stiles says, poking an elbow into his father’s side. “Seriously, as if you don’t have a whole university’s worth of utility pipes to mess around with.”

“Do I?” his dad says, mock-forgetfully.

Stiles shoves him again, half-heartedly, but his dad lets it part them. He does give Stiles’ head a tousle before they both go down into the yard and set about putting the finishing touches on the fryer. His dad really does like to tinker around, Stiles thinks as he watches the other man frown at the pressure gauge on one of the propane tanks. It’s easy to forget that, with how much time his dad spends yelling at other people to _stop_ disregarding very important protocols about not loosing entities inimical to humanity into their dimension, but before they even got to Miskatonic, they’d spend Thanksgiving like this. 

“It’s been a while, hasn’t it?” his dad suddenly says, as if somebody’s lab experiment has temporarily inflicted telepathy on the whole campus again. “Cooking turkey.”

“Yeah. Yeah, not since…middle school,” Stiles says after a moment. “That year you put the whole turkey in a foil tent, and almost shorted out the oven but we finally had one Mom didn’t burn.”

His dad snorts at the propane tank, but his eyes are fond. “I was cooking that way in college. I did that the first year she and I were together, you know. And then she got it into her head that this one day a year, she was going to take the cooking off me, damn it. She had her Food Network and her Butterball hotline on NPR, and she…”

“Yeah,” Stiles finishes. He watches his dad for a few seconds, then hands the man the safety gloves and welder’s mask when he’s finally done with the propane piping.

They test the flame height without the pot on the stand, then with the pot on. Then they fill up the pot with oil and pop in a thermometer, and calibrate the heating curve. Stiles has to pause and go back in to get his laptop because its regression algorithms are faster than his phone (anti-insanity wards really eat up the RAM), and glimpses Peter standing in the hall, hand up to one ear as if he’s talking on the phone to someone.

Peter hears him and starts to turn, but Stiles can see that the man is still in his boxers, which, nice as the view is, also means Peter’s not going out to kill anything. It doesn’t mean Peter isn’t talking about killing something, especially since his silhouette had had claws out before he’d noticed Stiles, but…Stiles reminds himself to leave them to their stuff, and goes back outside.

“You want to get the turkey on the hook?” his dad asks him, once they’ve got the oil settled.

“We’re not supposed to start frying for six hours,” Stiles says.

His dad starts, then checks the time on his phone. “Shit, right. Sorry. I forgot…it has been a while since I cooked.”

“Well, you know, any time you want to wean yourself off that fast food train, I’m here for you,” Stiles tells him. “Got the calorie calculator and sodium-intake studies and everything.”

Whereupon his father makes his umpteenth disgusted face, and then helps him transfer the oil back into its bottles for later. They splash a little, because while Stiles did set up an amazing catchment system around the fryer that uses certain eldritch applications of calculus to zip oil into a bin in the basement, he did not think to do that around the bottles themselves. So he gets oil on his shoes, and his dad makes him wait on the porch while the other man goes and gets some wipes.

Stiles checks his turkey-defrosting cam, but everything there still looks good. Then he realizes dawn’s actually breaking, and what’s more, doing it gloriously behind his turkey fryer, which is a pretty damn impressive feat of homegrown engineering and Tindalosian geometry, if he says so himself. So he’s holding up his phone with his non-sticky hand and trying to get it to stay on the extra-dimensional filter long enough for him to get the miniature tesseracts in the shot when suddenly a huge dark shape comes rocketing out of the brush.

“Oh— _no_!” he starts to yell, realizing that it’s going to take out the whole fryer and he did not think to account for perpendicular force, _shit_ —

Which is when the werewolf makes a distinctive _oh fuck_ whine mid-air, twists sharply, and then somehow swings its backlegs enough to the side that it avoids the fryer. It comes down just shy of the anchoring bolts, freezes in disbelief, and then shakes its head and plunges right back into the brush. A second later, as Stiles is yanking the spare taser out of the porch’s storage bench, there’s a weird, wettish _squawk_ and a series of deep animal coughs, like a tiger with a hairball. And then, amid a cacophony of snapping twigs and squelching mud, Scott appears.

“Sorry, sorry,” he pants. “I didn’t hit it, did I?”

“Um,” Stiles says from the porch. Then he stumbles off the first step as Scott turns around and reaches for the fryer. “No, wait! Don’t touch, if the wards got shaken up you might get relocated to the garbage compactor, I—here.”

He puts his phone back up and switches through the diagnostic filters. Everything on them seems to be fine, and he’s breathing a sigh of relief when suddenly, from his shoulder, his father barks: “Scott, what the hell—do you need help?” 

“Huh? Oh, no, no, it’s fine, I just—didn’t realize I was this close to your place,” Scott says hurriedly. He runs a dirty hand through his hair, then realizes what he’d just done and starts to claw out the filth as he turns around and looks at the smashed bushes. “You don’t need to come out or anything, it’s nothing big, I…um…”

“Hazardous waste disposal container?” Stiles guesses.

“Missing-limb tracking?” Stiles’ dad offers.

Scott jumps a little, then looks back at them, his expression torn between sheepish and guilty. “Um, no, I’m fine. I just…” he glances behind him, then suddenly goes tense.

Stiles goes to match up his phone with the taser for extended range, only to have his dad put a hand in front of him. He starts to protest, only to find his dad pulling out a Mi-go pipe that is _not_ supposed to be used outside of the campus purple zones.

“I’m good, really,” Scott says. He twists back around, smiling with all his teeth and yet still managing to come off about as predatory as a rabbit, and then stutter-steps backwards and stomps hard on something. “No big deal, you don’t need to come out or anything, we just were, um, following up on this lost-dog report and, um, you know, the wildlife is getting flushed out and disturbed and all. My fault, honestly. They’re all near hibernating, I should know better.”

“Doesn’t that mean their metabolisms are slowing down? So they don’t startle as much?” Stiles says.

“Also, you and Quint are both covered in blood,” Stiles’ dad points out. “The hell kind of wildlife is going to take you on, other than a black bear?”

Scott stiffens, then pulls Quint, who’d popped up on one shoulder to peer down at the ground, down into his cupped hands. He mumbles inaudibly over the squirrel’s annoyed chittering—Quint seems to be intact, down to the bushy tail-tentacles, and then his shoulders sag. “Oh, he’s okay,” he says, looking back up. Then he remembers he’s supposed to be lying and starts to get that big-eyed, panicky-swallowing expression that, frankly, guilt-trips a lot better than any abused-puppy nonprofit post card. “Um, so, here’s the thing—”

Not forcing it, Stiles reminds himself. “Dad, look, I know what you’re thinking, but—”

“All right, it’s fine, Scott,” Stiles’ dad suddenly says. He glances around, then looks down into his hands. Makes a little face at his momentary memory lapse and then holds up the can of wipes. “Stiles and I were just going to go inside and get breakfast anyway, so…”

“What about my sneakers?” Stiles stage-whispers, because yes, he is on board with this, but also, renter’s insurance (and establishing a record that it is _not_ on him if that happens).

“Just take ‘em off and carry them, it’s not like you’re gonna be using tools that could chop off a toe before you clean them off,” his dad mutters back. Then, once Scott’s given him an embarrassed nod, he lofts the wipes over to the other man. “If you need some more, just yell, all right?”

“Okay!” Scott calls back, waving his hand in thanks.

“Good diversion, Dad,” Stiles says as he slips his shoes off. “But you know we’re gonna have to recalibrate it now.”

His father shrugs. “Sure, fine. That’ll give me something to do while you make sure that turkey’s bone-dry. Because I saw those videos, Stiles, and I don’t really care what field-artillery experience Allison says she has, Chris and I both agree that there will be _no_ turkey cannon.”

“I did not pay for that level of small-business organic certification to not _eat_ it, Dad,” Stiles yelps. “Honestly, it’s like you think I don’t know what a no-hassle Thanksgiving looks like.”

“It’s a holiday, so this one time, I’m letting that go,” his dad says, roping him in with one arm. “Let’s just go eat, kid. Scott can deal with…whatever that was.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prague was, in fact, a medieval epicenter of alchemy and other offbeat searches for knowledge, even before Lovecraft decided that all of his evil body-jumping sorcerers were going to visit it at some point or the other (see: _The Case of Charles Dexter Ward_ ).


	4. Chapter 4

Breakfast is pretty lowkey, with Peter joining in for a bit but then excusing himself, with a careful eye on Stiles that Stiles pretends not to notice, for some kind of last-minute grocery run for Laura.

“He’s not lying,” Derek says once he’s finally dragged himself out of bed and downed three cups of coffee. “She thought pack got the leftovers.”

“They aren’t?” Stiles says, blinking. Then fights back a grimace as Derek’s face slips into a stiff scowl, which means the man’s trying to figure out how fast he can call Peter. “I mean, I did plan for leftovers and also sharing, since as far as I can remember, turkey’s not high on either you or Peter’s lists. Even if I do make a mean spicy turkey club, if I do say so myself.”

“It’s not, but it’s still your turkey and they don’t get _all_ the leftovers,” Derek mutters, settling back into his baseline disgruntled expression. “It’s a werewolf thing. But since it is Thanksgiving, and we’re trying to be nice, Peter said he’d pick up some food for them. Because Laura just let that go again because she never remembers the food when we’re busy with—yeah.”

“Turkey looks dry,” Stiles’ dad says, putting said bird back on its draining tray. He wipes his hands off and then goes to pick up the whole tub, only Derek gets there first.

Clearly, leftovers aren’t the only thing that awaken werewolf territorial instincts, though Derek at least has the decency to look like maybe Stiles’ father is _not_ the guy he wants to be so dramatically snatching the turkey from. He still doesn’t let go of the tub.

“Okay, well, anyway, it’s still a little early to take the plunge, but we should get this into the cooler,” Stiles says, nodding at the corner. As Derek turns, he squeezes past the other man and then points so that his dad will take the ventilation hookups on the other side of the room while he gets his side. Hopefully that’ll satisfy the instincts. “And we can call off whoever’s on dog-duty. Um, so, we didn’t actually have somebody on that all night, did we?”

“What?” Stiles’ dad says, just as Derek blinks and says, “Yeah, we did, why do you think it was so quiet?”

So, lesson to Stiles, never underestimate how seriously either of his boyfriends take their food, even if it’s not for the same reason. Anyway, Derek gets the turkey cooling and takes all the ventilation hookups, while Stiles and Stiles’ dad go outside to bring in Allison for a hot breakfast, since that’s the least they can do.

“It’s fine, it was quiet,” she says as she takes a seat at the kitchen island and starts to dig into her scrambled eggs. She eats a couple mouthfuls, then starts to look around. Stiles’ dad offers her the hot sauce and she politely shakes her head. “Pepper, actually? If you have some.”

“Oh, yeah,” Stiles’ dad says, grimacing, as he hands that over. “Sorry, I should’ve put that in. Not that you can tell, but I paid for part of college by working as a short-order cook.”

“It’s fine, I don’t mind seasoning my own,” Allison says sunnily, as if her father doesn’t randomly pop up with restaurant-quality entrees whenever Melissa can’t get out of the office. “So is that for the turkey? Doesn’t that burn off in the oil?”

Stiles shakes the spices off his hand and then saran-wraps the bowl for later, then pulls over his phone to check his timeline. “That’s why you dust after it’s been fried. But I use the same mix for the stuffing, so I’m just making up a big batch now so it’ll be consistent across dishes.”

“You want me to get out the sausages yet?” asks Stiles’ dad, with maybe a little too much enthusiasm.

“We’re T-minus three and a half hours,” Stiles says. “Also, all those need are chopping. The _vegetables_ need some attention, though.”

“Oh. You know what, I’m going to see if Derek’s done putting the grates back on the vents,” Stiles’ dad says. “Sure it’ll taste great, son.”

And then he just walks out on Stiles. Honestly. “I have three pounds of onion right _here_ ,” Stiles sputters. “Three pounds that need to be peeled and chopped and let me tell you, _nobody_ has figured out how to keep your eyes from stinging. Well, unless you also want the ability to see the vengeful dead as they turn you into a meat-puppet.”

“Here, I’ll help, just give me a sec to finish this,” Allison says, downing a forkful of eggs.

At that point, Stiles starts to feel guilty about his ranting, but Allison being Allison, not only won’t take ‘no’ for an answer, but unlike Scott, she does it smiling while doing a one-handed peel of an onion with a knife. A regular one, not the paring knife.

“My dad just showed me the other day, more blade means you have the length to adjust if the onion’s bigger,” she explains. “And I don’t mind, really. I’m not on patrol for another half-hour and I used to help Dad all the time with the stuffing.”

“So I’m not the only one who does Thanksgiving,” Stiles says without thinking. Then almost smacks himself in the eye with a palm covered in onion juice. “Ugh, sorry, I’ve been up researching turkey fryers, just pretend you didn’t hear that.”

Allison had paused when he’d said that, but she doesn’t seem that upset. She is looking at him, even as her knife reduces onion after onion to neat little cubes. “We stopped getting invited to the big Argent family dinner after my dad told off my grandfather, but we’d still do something,” she says after a moment. Calm and matter-of-fact, as she picks up another onion. “Dad thought it was important—and I think he stole the stuffing recipe from my great-grandma or something like that, so it was kind of a thing to make it and eat it.”

“A culinary fuck-you? I can get behind that,” Stiles says.

“He’s never gonna admit it, but yeah, pretty much,” Allison says, a smile playing around her mouth but not quite making it out there. “Mom’s family is crazy religious and doesn’t do any holidays, period, so the whole thing was spitting in their eye, for her. We…didn’t do it as much after she died. We just got busy with all the fighting.”

“Yeah, I know how that feels,” Stiles mutters.

Allison looks up at him again, and he ducks his head before he can stop himself. Still, even if he’s giving himself away, that doesn’t mean he wants to unburden himself and so he starts peeling carrots.

It’s not as if they aren’t friends; they are now, not just mutually-connected by Scott. Stiles honestly likes Allison and even if she sometimes scares him, it’s usually about being super-protective of Scott, which is also something he can understand. He’s just—not trying to make this holiday a big deal.

“So listen, I know Scott thinks it’s super-important for me to not worry about the rolling dumpster fire with optional torched relationships that is this town, but seriously,” Stiles says instead. “How bad is it? You don’t have to give me details, I’m not gonna run out, I’m just—asking for purposes of knowing whether I should pull the bird a bit early so we can refire it when people actually can get in.”

“What? It’s fine,” Allison says, blinking hard. Then she shakes herself. She lowers the knife and is clearly having an internal debate about whether she should break the Beacon Hills omerta, and then (this is why Stiles likes her) she sighs. “It honestly is, compared to other Thanksgivings. We know who’s responsible, we know what their plan is, the major problem just is taking them down without people noticing all the werewolves and tentacles and that stuff, since the sheriff is being such a dick right now that I don’t really blame Scott’s mom for not wanting to ask him for more favors. I mean, do you think I’d be letting Scott pair up with Erica if I thought it was really bad?”

“I’ve been faithfully _not_ checking the patrol schedule, by the way,” Stiles tells her. “And I believe you, it’s just Scott seems weirdly stressed about me, and I thought he understood I don’t care about the weird. I mean, I thought he got that I am literally trying to make an academic career out of it.”

Allison sighs again. She sweeps up the onion bits, looks to Stiles and when he nods at the right bowl, starts to transfer them over. “Yeah, I know, and he does. He just—you know how he is, about not wanting people to feel like they have to go out of their way, if he can do something about it. He’s doing the same thing to the Nemeton if it makes you feel better.”

“Huh?” Stiles says, intelligently, as if this is also not the area where he’s trying to carve out a doctorate degree.

“You didn’t wonder about why we’re not letting it take care of things?” Allison says, frowning.

Stiles puts his carrot down. “Well, so, it’s a pseudo-Cthulhic entity that even when it wasn’t taking pages out of the _Book of Eibon_ , was pretty emphatically pursuing its own agenda, or so Dr. Deaton’s historical records tell me. So I didn’t realize there was any kind of negotiating power on the table, let alone supervision.”

“Okay, that did sound patronizing,” Allison says, surprising him with the course-correct. She flicks off the last few onion pieces from her fingers, then reaches for the garlic bulbs. “I didn’t mean it that way, but we do…sort of communicate with it. Well, Quint does, and apparently the Nemeton starts to get sleepy, or something, at this time of year?”

“Slower metabolic processes, yeah, because it’s got tentacles but it still is based off this dimension’s biology,” Stiles nods, taking out his phone and starting to take notes.

“So short version, the Nemeton could help out, but it’d have to wake up, and Scott doesn’t want to bother it and when it does help, his mom gets frustrated with the paperwork because it never leaves much of the body, and the rest of us are just a _little_ nervous about owing a giant sentient man-eating tree with babies all over the preserve.” And then Allison smacks the can of tomatoes down onto the garlic bulb, sending half-smashed cloves skittering all over the counter. She intercepts the two that teeter off the counter edge and neatly de-skins them, then offers them to Stiles. “How minced do you want them?”

“Oh, um, rough chop,” Stiles says. “Also, if it makes you feel better, the Botany Department did rule out the Nemeton actually being an obligate carnivore.”

Allison raises an eyebrow. “So I should feel better because it eats people because it wants to, not because it needs the nutrients?”

“I’m just saying, studies have proven that it’s a lot easier to effectuate dietary shifts when you can reframe the discussion as about sociocultural factors and not about biology,” Stiles says. 

Then he rethinks that statement—not because it isn’t true, because it is, but because that is an awful lot of academic jargon to toss at somebody this early in the morning. But before he can offer a simplified version, Allison gives him a shrug. “I know the ghouls and the Deep Ones made that transition, but I still think it’s easier to relate to beings who form families than to something that has ‘acorn clones.’”

Stiles blinks.

“I did get mostly A’s this last semester, and Caitlin invited Melissa to come down and speak at next year’s annual corposium,” Allison says, with just a hint of tease in her eye. She finishes up the cloves and then starts looking around the counter. “Want some help with those carrots?”

Well, never let it be said that Stiles can’t recognize an expert when he sees one, or doesn’t listen to his own rants about people who are too obsessed with family pride to properly deploy resources. He hands over the carrots.

“Thanks,” Allison says, oddly, as if she’s the one taking advantage. She seems to pick up on that and her shoulders hunch a little. She doesn’t look like she’s going to explain, and Stiles is going to just leave her to the veg while he redoes his entire cooking timeline with the fifteen minutes she just opened up, and then…“I really don’t mind, honestly. I don’t have a lot to do this year, and—you know, I really should be happy about that. I should. It’s _way_ better than running around shooting things while I don’t know whether Scott’s taking someone to the hospital or ending up there himself, or if anyone even _knows_ where he is—I guess it’s just a little weird to have this much downtime.”

If this is what they look like with downtime, then Stiles…really needs to finish Derek’s movie. He’s still got thirty-four minutes left because he’d taken a break to go use his dad’s login to certain government databases and look up the current locations of a few people whose names should get slipped to Lydia’s fellow MIT comp-sci/mathematics students (look, Dad can come up with all of the psych screens he wants, but at the end of the day, bored hackers are gonna hack, so personally, Stiles thinks it’s more effective to just contain the _targets_ rather than the hackers).

But he doesn’t say that to Allison. He just sweeps the carrot peelings, which are getting mountainous, out of the way and then starts on dezipping the celery.

“Honestly, that might be why he’s acting like this, too,” Allison adds, glancing at him. “It’s not like we forgot you have that degree or anything, but—you did freak him out with what you did to the _kanima_. And it doesn’t matter to him if you can take care of yourself, he still is going to want to make sure you don’t have to.”

“ _He_ needs a vacation,” Stiles says.

Allison makes a face. “Yeah, I know. I thought about saying something but his mom’s already tried and…you know, sometimes you just need to let Scott run it off. When he’s tired, it’s easier to snap him out of help-everybody mode and make him look after himself.”

“Well, he’ll sit down for turkey if I have to ask Derek and Peter to make him,” Stiles says. Then holds his hands up when Allison twitches. “Kidding. Mostly. I mean—”

“Oh, I’m not mad. I just want you to let me do it, if it comes to that,” Allison says, lifting her head to show a beatific smile. She holds it for a moment, then giggles so it softens into something a little more human. “Anyway, Quint’s with him, and I know this sounds weird, but I trust him to keep track of Scott.”

“So…you know me and you know what I do and don’t judge, but I have to admit, it does sound weird,” Stiles says. “Don’t get me wrong, I love me some octo-squirrel, but, um, Nemeton? Didn’t you just say you don’t really trust it?”

“Well, because I _don’t_. It wants what it wants, and it’s a magical tree so that’s water, sunlight, soil, and werewolves, and I’m starting to think that last one is more about getting it a steady supply of fertilizer than anything else,” Allison mutters. She finishes up a carrot, then pauses and looks down at the little orange cubes. “But…it does like him. And…this is also going to sound weird, but I think it has a sense of humor, and I think I…kind of get it these days? So if Scott gets in too much trouble—”

“It’ll eat whatever is bothering him?” Stiles supplies.

Allison nods. “And what it _doesn’t_ get is that’s going to make him sad, but okay, I don’t know how much it cares about that anyway and I can talk Scott through it. Well, that, and you and your dad said the Nemeton hasn’t developed any telepathic powers over humans.”

“Nope, none of that. Believe me, if we were seeing signs of that, you and Derek would be the first people to know,” Stiles says. “I might study cosmic horror aliens but I don’t condone them, and neither does the University, at least as long as my dad’s running security for them.”

“Well, I believe that, anyway,” Allison snorts, as she scoops up a double-handful of chopped carrots. “I signed up for that History of Miskatonic elective you mentioned, and they already posted the reading list.”

“You went into the optional section, right?” Stiles says. “Because that’s where all the good stuff is. Phillips can’t make those mandatory because some of the professors involved still have intact minds, but with her family, they’re not going to pull her tenure.”

Allison starts to answer him, even looking a little excited—she’s still wary about Miskatonic, as she should be, but she’s very into their library resources—when her phone goes off. She jumps a little, then wipes her hands off and pulls that out; it’s a bunch of texts, not a call, and she’s frowning as she reads them but her hands aren’t shaking and she isn’t giving off any vibes like she’s going ditch Stiles for a date with her crossbow.

“I think I might have to go pick up Cora,” she finally says, looking annoyed. She starts texting back, then sighs. “Sorry about this, I know you still have a ton left on your list, but I don’t know what she’s doing on the south side of town with Parrish’s patrol car. I _do_ know we’d better give that back to him ASAP, or Scott and Melissa and Dad are going to be spending dinner arguing with the sheriff again.”

“Oh, no problem, Derek and Dad are still around,” Stiles says. “Actually, come to think of it, I should go see what’s keeping them. It can’t take that long to put the vents back.”

* * *

It doesn’t. “He said he had to go pick up his sister, but to tell you that they weren’t going to kill anybody or get into a fight,” Stiles’ dad says by way of explaining why he is standing in the laundry room with a topographic map of the preserve up on his laptop and no Derek. “Also, Peter was just in here looking for you.”

“He’s back from the grocery run?” Stiles says.

“Back, yes. Groceries I don’t know about, since as far as I could tell, he was helping out Chris,” his dad mutters. “Wasn’t he supposed to be getting those for Laura?” 

“Yeah, but also, Allison just left to pick up—okay, no, Derek has two sisters so that’s not necessarily lying, that’s just confusing and…” Stiles makes himself take a breath, because this is supposed to be a _vacation_.

It’s supposed to be a vacation, and it’s not like people aren’t communicating with him; he thinks to take his phone out of timer mode and finds a couple texts each from Derek and Peter that he’d missed, letting him know that they were really sorry but that they’d been asked to run another couple quick errands. Derek even goes so far as to say that his errand means Scott’s mom will be able to make dinner, while Peter admits that he can’t pass up the opportunity to gloat over Chris actually asking him for help on magic (Deaton’s not available because he went back to Quebec for the week). Which are huge steps for both of them, and Stiles knows that and appreciates that, and still.

“Dad, I know we told everybody we really wanted to have a good Thanksgiving dinner, but I’m starting to feel like that was premature,” Stiles says after a few seconds, during which he really, honestly, truly tries to reason with himself about just leaving things alone. And fails miserably, because he’s been focused on the wrong thing all along and even worse, made Scott focus on it too. “And I know you’re just going to say I’m butting my head into business that isn’t mine and not thinking about the consequences for other people, but—”

“This is stupid,” Stiles’ father suddenly says, glaring at his laptop. “If that goddamn idiot with a badge had just closed the preserve like Melissa had wanted, they would’ve wrapped this up yesterday. They’re spending so much time trying to keep this to the edges so nobody sees and—you could set up a trap box with a five-yard perimeter in the parking lot and close this out in half an hour. I even _have_ the parts in the clinic basement, we didn’t ship them back after that last sampling round.”

Stiles closes his mouth. Then opens it, and then closes it again.

His dad’s shoulders tighten up a little bit, but that doesn’t stop him from opening up a fresh window and logging into Miskatonic’s inventory system. “Son, I know you were set on a good meal and you’re still gonna fry that turkey, so all the work you put in won’t go to waste. But do we have to eat at five? Can we push it to six?”

“Actually, so long as it’s not squash, Allison has mad chopping skills, so we’re over half an hour ahead of schedule,” Stiles finally says. “You’re asking because if there’s just me and you and we have to add shielding for the Nemeton, we’re gonna need an extra hour for the set-up, right? Because you’re accounting for that, right? Dad?”

“Yeah. And that shouldn’t be the problem, Botany already added some adaptations when we had it out before and yeah, I _remember_ how they messed up that time in Maine, but we fired that adjunct professor,” his father says, still typing madly. “I’m more concerned about the fact that we’re going to have to have the camouflage so close, since that idiot sheriff can’t just put up a goddamn—”

“Dad?” Stiles says.

His father looks up, annoyed, and then sees Stiles’ face. The annoyance sags a little, not quite into embarrassment, but definitely well within self-awareness territory. “You know, if the timing will be too tight, I can just do the wards myself,” he says. “You can stay back here.”

Stiles stares at him. His dad stares back, completely serious.

“Dad, are you _kidding_ me,” Stiles sputters. “Have you even been listening—it’s not about the food! It’s just, I wanted to do something nice because we actually have people to hang out with this year! People we want to hang out with, and not just because it feels weird without Mom, except they’re not actually here and I don’t need to fry the stupid turkey if they’re all busy trying to keep us not busy!”

And even if that’s what they want to do, as everyone keeps telling Stiles, it’s still driving him insane. So maybe he’s a self-centered asshole, but then that’s just how he is, he thinks. He’ll deal with them being mad at him.

“Oh,” his dad finally says. “So you agree with me.”

“I—um, yes?” Stiles says, blinking.

His dad shuts the laptop and takes one step towards the garage door. Then pulls himself back and looks at Stiles. He’s still annoyed, but it’s not at Stiles, and it’s tinged with more than a little bit of regret. “I let things slide into work after your mother died,” he says. He’s trying to keep his voice even but it’s tending towards heavy. “And we pushed that back some, but I know I never really got a handle on Thanksgiving again, and I should’ve.”

“Dad—come on, it wasn’t really like that,” Stiles says after a second. He shifts uncomfortably on his feet. “We always sat down and ate together. You always made time for me—I know that. You did, I saw you, so you can’t pretend you didn’t. Okay, so it wasn’t what we did with Mom, but—but she was gone. Honestly, it would’ve been _weird_ if we’d just kept on with the same—so we did our own thing. And—and that’s all I ever really wanted, anyway. Really.”

For a second, Stiles thinks his dad’s going to argue with him on this point. He’s staring at Stiles with that tight, pinched expression that Stiles hasn’t seen on him since the years right after Stiles’ mom had died, when he’d always seemed like he was just trying to hold onto his temper. Though that wasn’t really what was going on, Stiles had eventually realized. At least, it wasn’t anger that his father had been trying to keep him from seeing.

And then his father’s laptop gains a soft banana-yellow corona. They both look down at it and his father starts to take it out from under his arm, then pauses. Looks up at the ceiling, mutters something, takes a breath, and then looks back down at Stiles. “Well,” he starts, and then cuts himself off. Then he takes another, slower breath. “I could’ve upgraded with better takeout.”

“Or you could’ve let me cook earlier,” Stiles says. “I had all the grease-fire supplies, you know. I watched the first-aid videos. I had the splatter shields, even!”

“I remember those,” his dad says, grinning a little. He fiddles with the laptop. “I remember the year you messed up the angles and diverted all the smoke into one of the library annexes, and I had to sweet-talk the dean into enrolling you in Miskatonic’s pre-college program a year early so the Psych department would stop trying to make you a case study.”

“And that was an honest mistake with my protractor, Dad, and not a cry for help,” Stiles snorts. He catches his dad’s eye and for a second they both hesitate; that grin on his dad’s face is on the thin side. “It worked out—I’m glad it worked out. I like my degree, you know. I like studying what I study. And you—you did get that for me.”

“Yeah. Yeah, well…” his dad starts, clearly about to brush it off. But then the laptop’s glow starts to pulsate. “Shit. Well, all right, but just because you were fine with it then doesn’t mean—”

“Oh, yeah, we are _totally_ having guests at our first turkey fry,” Stiles says. “I was fine with it when it was me and you, but now it’s not just me and you, and I am _also_ fine with that. More than fine with. In fact, I am absolutely down to draw a line in the sand and watch some idiot cross it straight into sunken R’lyeh, if that’s what’s on the menu this year.”

Stiles’ dad’s expression progresses rapidly from pained to pained-with-a-smile back to pained. “Okay, son, let’s just back that up, because _I_ don’t feel like the paperwork,” he says, shaking a finger at Stiles as he walks towards the garage. “So we’re going with my plan. Secure the area, get everybody back for the meal, and _no_ last-minute experiments, prototypes, or unauthorized shoggoth releases.”

“Dad, I want to people to be able to _eat_ ,” Stiles sputters, scrambling after the man. “Over half of them are werewolves, I would never do that to their olfactory organs.”

“I’m just saying—”

“That was _Canada_! It wasn’t my fault, it was all that maple syrup! Which they take way too seriously anyway, I mean, even if it’s a strategic reserve, siccing Ithaqua on your bloodline is just extreme—”

“Stiles,” Stiles’ father sighs, pulling up besides the car. “ _Stiles_.”

Stiles pauses, looking up. 

“Door?” his dad says.

“What? Oh, right, sorry,” Stiles says. He turns around and pulls the door shut, then arms all of the protective spells. Then he turns back.

By that point, his dad’s gotten into the car and has the engine started, with the front passenger door open and ready for him. He pauses again, taking a breath, and the stray thought crosses his mind that he’s going to have to redo his turkey timeline. 

Which is fine, and he gets into the car. Because honestly, it is _not_ about the stupid turkey.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Peter dens via home improvement, Derek dens via foodstuffs. To each their own.
> 
> The Deep Ones aren't usually portrayed as eating people, just as being terrifying cultists who happen to be amphibious, but when you're in the water, food is food. When you're out of the water, they clearly can pass as normal for a good couple decades.
> 
> Allison and squash have some [issues](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17129507/chapters/40326017).
> 
> The Canadian maple syrup strategic reserve is a thing, and it's taken very seriously, and if Ithaqua was real and not just the Cthulhu Mythos' take on the wendigo/Sasquatch, I wouldn't be surprised if somebody tried to leverage it to protect the reserve.


	5. Chapter 5

It is, however, about the inability of anything in Beacon Hills to remotely resemble standard operating procedure. And yeah, Stiles does inhabit a world where entire fields of study are dedicated to understanding just what kind of impersonal chaos Great Old Ones want to sow among humanity, but…look, they’ve got a taxonomy and ritual hierarchy and geometric doctrines, things like that. It’s not that they don’t have order, it’s just that people can’t comprehend it without experiencing a psychotic break.

Beacon Hills, on the other hand.

So once Stiles stops the conscious selective amnesia and compares notes with his father, they easily deduce that this is yet another case of a pack trying to horn on in on Laura and Scott. Laura doesn’t make her betas stay forever and ever, so people assume she’s weak, while the moment anyone hears about Scott training to be a vet and having a pet squirrel, they think he’s defective (because sure, true werewolf-ness means you’re cruel to animals at the same time you’re fetishizing your wild-side otherness). However, the invading pack _has_ heard some version of the Nemeton story, so instead of setting a time and date for a territorial brawl, they’ve done their research and…created a golem. Because what better way to take out a semi-sentient man-eating tree than by beating up a rabbi, stealing his heirloom grimoire, and creating a mud-based robot?

“I mean, I can kind of follow the logic, if I take the Fantastic Four, add in religious misappropriation, and account for the fact that they’re too lazy to rent a bulldozer,” Stiles says as he and his dad watch the golem collapse into a giant pile of dirt clods. “This totally makes sense on a subreddit somewhere.”

“Stiles, it doesn’t have to make sense so long as we’ve got all of the mass accounted for,” his father mutters while fiddling with his phone. “You want to go around and take a second reading so we can average it out? Because if we missed one, hell if I’m hosting the entire Ecology department out here. The talk with the USDA’s going to be bad enough.”

On top of thinking that rock was going to beat paper (more or less), the idiot pack had sourced their dirt from the outskirts of the preserve, which meant that the Nemeton, having the home-court advantage, had some sway over the golem. So once created, it hadn’t been able to reconcile its conflicting impulses and had just been stumbling around the preserve, scaring the hell out of the wildlife and giving Laura’s pack a headache in trying to keep it away from anyone with a working phone camera. The Nemeton had apparently noticed this issue and had decided to counter with mutant earthworms. With teeth. 

This makes slightly more sense, if you’re trying to figure out a way to dissolve an earth-based entity and are limited to local Californian wildlife for tools, but…earthworms don’t have eyes capable of distinguishing between golems and people so they’d been chomping anything two-legged. And now Stiles understands why Scott, friend to all living things, hadn’t minded smashing one in the backyard. Because bloodsucking earthworms, no.

Anyway, coopting the spells on the golem had been pre-college stuff. Getting it to stay together long enough to lure all of the mutated earthworms to it had been slightly trickier, given Stiles and his dad have limited supplies, but they’d managed and now they’re just staring at a rune-contained ball of swollen, slimy brown-pink tubes slowly writhing off its soil coating. 

“Liquid nitro?” Stiles suggests. “I mean, okay, it’ll still be gross once the bits thaw out, but at least then we don’t have to worry about accidental forest fires. Or the smell.”

Stiles’ father flicks him a look. “So, son, you volunteering to tweezer all of those fragments into sample tubes?”

“Right,” Stiles says, after thinking about it.

They settle on short-term modified Mi-go stasis, plus putting the earthworm ball under an opaque plastic tent with SEWER MAINTENANCE signs all over it. Eventually someone’s going to have to figure out actual disposal for the earthworms, but as Stiles’ father reminds him, it is Thanksgiving, and even the Yellow Sign followers have headed back to Carcosa for their yearly mass psychosis revival. It can wait till Monday.

That taken care of, Stiles’ father boots up his laptop to check out where everyone is on dealing with the actual intruding pack, then frowns. He closes his window before Stiles can see it, then restarts his computer.

“What happened?” Stiles says, immediately taking his phone out. He sees that several texts have come in just within the last few minutes, which makes him let out a big sigh of relief. “Well, wait, Scott sent me something.”

“They’re not showing up,” Stiles’ father mutters. “No, not us. Them. I don’t see them anywhere on this. They were all in play the last I checked and that was forty minutes ago. There’s no way that they left town that fast—shit, the frogs.”

_Hey, Stiles_ , is all Stiles reads of Scott’s text before he and his dad find themselves staring at the neat little tent. _Hey, sorry, brb_ , Stiles texts back before he and his dad pop back into the tent and run a series of diagnostics on some of the earthworm feces.

No werewolf DNA comes up. Which is good, because no, Stiles doesn’t actually support werewolf-eating earthworms, but it does leave an important question hanging in the air.

“Maybe the Nemeton’s discovered non-Euclidean geometry?” Stiles suggests, as his dad frowns at his buzzing phone. “Is that Melissa’s ringtone?”

“Yeah, she texted me a couple minutes ago, something about not bothering the sheriff. Think she figured out that we’re here,” his dad says, with a small grimace. He moves his phone off to the side of the car, which he’s using to prop up his laptop, and then gestures for Stiles to come to the keyboard. “I’ll call her back once we figure out where that other pack got to. I _thought_ MIT had crunched the numbers and ruled out it learning how to work tesseracts—”

Stiles right-clicks to bring up the source code for the program his dad is using, checks which version it is, and then rewinds the analysis so he can redo the parameters. “Okay, so this is a long shot, admittedly, but instead of creating from scratch, maybe it just tapped into premade pocket dimensions. There’s no _formal_ record of the K’n-yan ever getting this far west, but…”

“You logged into the digital archives?” his dad asks, leaning over his shoulder. Then the man steps away and opens the back door of his car. “No, stay on that, I can log in from my backup and check the restricted files while you’re looking for traces.”

Makes sense to Stiles, so he fires up the tent sensors and does a basic scan for K’n-yan while his dad digs into the historical records. Nothing immediately pops up—but then, the Miskatonic team would have run that one when they’d set up the initial Nemeton studies. Stiles makes a face at himself for running the rulebook without thinking, then starts to reconfigure for a deeper scan. He still would be really surprised if it _was_ K’n-yan, since one of their hallmarks is a complete lack of bodily remains of their victims, and up till the Nemeton got Cthulhu-cized, that was abundantly _not_ the local problem. On the other hand, K’n-yan influences would fit the odd sense of humor Allison keeps mentioning…

“Oh, my God, you’re actually here,” someone says.

Stiles jumps and his dad halfway activates the Yellow-Sign sigils on the car, and then they realize it’s Cora. Staring at them. Staring at them while sitting in shotgun in Boyd’s car (Boyd is diplomatically checking the rest of the preserve for threats).

“I _told_ Derek and Peter and Laura, you said you were setting up a trap here, so we should check here,” Cora goes on, wrinkling her nose and rolling her eyes. “But _no_ , that’s too obvious, Stiles and his dad would never just _stay put_ with the _eldritch earthworms_ when that’s exactly what your whole thesis is about—”

“It is not! I’m classified under Anthropology, not Life Sciences!” Stiles sputters. “That is a _whole_ separate psychosis screener!”

“Are they looking for us?” Stiles’ dad says, loudly, over both of them. And then stares hard at Cora when she visibly thinks about snarking back at Stiles. “Why?”

Cora pauses, flicks a look at the still-glowing sigils on Stiles’ dad’s car, and then decides to answer. “Well, because we thought you were cooking. And we’re done, you know?”

“Done?” Stiles and his dad say.

“Yeah, done. Bad guys tased and tranqed, Parrish opened up the good cells in the jail, and Peter even came up with an alibi that doesn’t mean we gotta spend Black Friday planting body parts,” Cora says. “So why is the turkey still raw?”

* * *

Two hours later, after _many_ calls and texts and one round of exasperated Melissa asking Stiles and his dad why, when they’re insisting on getting involved, they can’t also pay attention to the pack group chat, everyone finally assembles for the turkey. Which is perfectly fried and golden-brown and delicious to the point that even Quint can’t resist it, although Stiles has to draw the line at giving him the _whole_ turkey neck.

“I still have to finish off the gravy,” he explains to Scott. “And then all the flavor’s going to be gone, though if he still wants the bones to play with, that’s totally doable.”

“It’s okay, I’m still in the middle of explaining the sharing part of the holiday to him. This’ll be a great teaching moment,” Scott says, entirely seriously, and then skips back to the living room before Stiles can suggest that maybe they should retest Quint’s cognitive levels, because what. Abstract concepts?

Anyway, the food turns out fine, and everybody’s whole and there to enjoy it. “Which is what I wanted, honestly,” Stiles tells Peter, who sidled in immediately after Scott departed (Derek’s hanging around in the doorway, pretending like he’s actually glowering at Isaac and Cora fighting it out over the last thigh). “Just a good meal, with people I want to hang out with, and no chance of a K-level dimensional breach. It wasn’t supposed to be work for anyone.”

“Exactly, and I’ll be having some _conversations_ with Chris later about his family’s propensity for shooting first and thinking of the bullet casings later,” Peter mutters, glaring over his shoulder.

Chris is in the middle of shoveling deep-fried brussel sprouts on Stiles’ dad’s plate while Stiles’ dad and Melissa…um, sit very close together and do something on Stiles’ dad’s tablet that requires Melissa to hold his hand, but his head comes up as if Peter had blown a whistle. Which is when Stiles twists up a fistful of Peter’s shirt and pulls him fully into the kitchen.

“I said it’d be a conversation, Stiles. No need for property damage, unless of course you’d rather we escalate,” Peter says, brows raised, as his shirt—which of course is at least one size too small for those pecs—gives way at one seam. 

He lifts one hand towards the rip, then blinks hard when Stiles beats him to it, leaving the stove to step right up to Peter’s front and tucking a hand into Peter’s front pants pocket to lock it. “Okay, I’m still twenty minutes behind and at this point, the gravy’s going to end up going out with the pies because people can’t wait six minutes for it to thicken before stuffing their faces with Scott’s mom’s garlic mashed potatoes and honestly, I totally understand, and I’m just gonna say—I don’t want perfect, okay? Because I know how you are, and I’m not saying you can’t have your standards or recognize your personal history or even your putdowns, since that’s basically customary manner and practice, because again, I _know_ you, but…this isn’t work. This is Turkey Day, and you and Derek and Dad and everybody, they’re here and eating my turkey, and that’s—that’s it, Peter. Seriously.”

Peter understands what Stiles is saying. He always does, and there’s always that moment where his practiced charm freezes in place, not because he’s being insincere but because sincerity is not really something he practices, and so his face never quite knows what to do with it. This is not something Stiles can fix—it’s not something Stiles wants to fix (a reluctant realization, but this is why he doesn’t worry about passing the part of Miskatonic’s psych screen that’s about megalomania), and maybe it’s not something Peter wants to fix either. Stiles might ask about that, some day, but…not today.

“It’s cool if we miscommunicated about it, too. I mean, Thanksgiving, right?” Stiles adds. Which is too flippant, because he can see Peter reaching for the comeback zinger, that smooth smile coming onto the man’s face, and he sighs and tugs the man closer. “I know you had it under control. That’s not why Dad and I went out. We just—we got bored, because it was just us—”

“Which is why we were rushing—” Peter starts.

“Yeah, I know, and I’m not—I’m not mad about that. This isn’t like the other time when we went to Zamacoma,” Stiles says. He cranes his neck—he’s a little taller than Peter, and he’s trying to drop his head level, keeping in mind werewolf perspectives on body language. “We were all talking. And trying to be respectful of how busy people were. But it’s just…we wanted to hang out, you know? And whether it’s turkey or mutant earthworms, whatever, it’s fine, I mean, I don’t need a life of law and order. I’m literally pursuing a degree in applied chaos, if you revert to the Latin.”

Peter sucks in his breath, like he’s going to protest some more, and then holds it. Studies Stiles for a second, head cocked, and then his shoulders resettle themselves a little. Which is when Stiles knows to grin, and let the man kiss him slightly longer than is really necessary for simple reaffirmation (but hey, Peter’s tongue is always welcome).

“This _is_ why I work at it,” Peter says, drawing back. It’s unusually blunt of him, and he seems to think that too, looking a little guarded. But then he settles again, and lets Stiles smooth his shirt back down his stomach. “Well, all right, and a twenty-minute delay really is nothing around here.”

“You can probably put the gravy on the carrots anyway, instead of skipping to the pie.” At some point Derek sneaked past both of them and is now lifting the gravy pot from the stove. He leans over, sniffs, and then pours the gravy into the waiting gravy boat. “They’re still hard in the center. Could use another couple minutes in the oven.”

Stiles blinks. “I thought Chris brought the carrots.”

“He did,” Peter says, a slow, delighted smirk spreading across his face. “And they’re not done, I am shocked. _Shocked_. And how did we discover this?”

“Oh, your dad took a bite and said that,” Derek says, nodding at Stiles.

“Should I be insulted that sticking it to Chris apparently ranks higher than kitchen gropes?” Stiles asks a second later, staring at Peter’s departing back.

Derek grunts, which is usually what Stiles expects. But then he turns around and hands Stiles a plate of food, including a hand-size piece of turkey skin and the flat part of the wing, both of which are Stiles’ preferred bits and which Stiles had resigned himself to missing this year since he’d been rushing back to finish the gravy (note to self, the Beacon Hills peeps are definitely a dark-meat crowd so next year he’s just going to get a separate, extra bag of wings).

“He’s only doing it because he’s sure we’re cool about everything,” Derek says.

Stiles takes the plate, grinning. He’s making Derek uncomfortable, he can tell by the way the man’s trying to scrunch his coat forward on his shoulders so it’s leather first, but he can’t help it. “If I didn’t know that it’d mortally damage your street cred, I’d hug you and mess with your hair in pure joy.”

“Now you sound like my sisters,” Derek says, scowling. Then he pauses. Glances back into the other room. “Okay, except they never give a shit about my…look, if you have to, just do it while they’re busy so they don’t think it’s a new game.”

He is entirely serious. Because Derek, for all the shit he gives Peter about denning, is in fact invested in this thing that he and Peter and Stiles have, and he’s going to be nervous about it no matter how many how-to guides he and Stiles exchange. This is also something that is not to be fixed by Stiles (although resisting is a lot harder than with Peter, if Stiles is honest), just lived with and in and around, and Stiles is, in fact, cool with that.

“Fine, we can skip the hug,” Stiles says. 

He puts the plate down on the counter and makes like he’s rooting in the drawers for utensils so Derek has a second to process. Then, once Derek’s gotten past his usual reflexive sag of relief and to that moment where he realizes they will not be making contact and starts to get disappointed instead, Stiles edges in and leans up and then hangs there so Derek can kiss him.

“I like the turkey,” Derek mutters, once they’ve separated. “And you take half the time Peter takes.”

“You mean that you take because he makes you take over once it’s in the oven?” Stiles says.

He doesn’t actually know, just has an idea, based on other times he’s seen Derek and Peter in the kitchen, but Derek’s snort tells him he’s right. Then Derek stands there, looking down at Stiles, hands still on Stiles’ waist. Usually Derek’s either one-and-done or onto slaughtering their clothes, no in-between, but this time he doesn’t seem to be in a hurry either way. And he seems comfortable like that. Meditation is not his preferred state of being, but that’s not a bad description for his expression, Stiles thinks.

“So did you get to fight?” Stiles asks.

Derek narrows his eyes a little. “It wasn’t the best part,” he says. The corners of his mouth twitch, upwards. “But yeah. It happened.”

“Okay,” Stiles says, grinning and kissing him again.

* * *

“So you’re glad you spent the holiday with us?” Scott asks as he wields the packing-tape dispenser. “I know things got started a little late, but everybody really loved the food. Mom even thinks we should deep-fry next year.”

Stiles starts to feel pleased with himself, almost messes up the symbol he’s trying to ink onto the packing label, and bites back his first reply to Scott in favor of just finishing up the symbol. He really should be just typing it out, and then he wouldn’t have to worry about accidentally invoking the Yellow King, but then he’d have to go bug his dad for the specially-warded printer. Besides, the Yellow King takes an average of five appearances and six weeks to fully induce psychosis, so plenty of time to institute countermeasures (it’s just his dad will never let him hear the end of it, postal going postal).

“It was great,” he says when he’s finally done. Then looks up in time to see Scott eyeing him in mild disbelief. “No, really. Besides, the whole late thing was on Dad and me for not keeping up with the updates we’d specifically asked you for.”

Scott puts the dispenser down, then pauses as Quint takes the opportunity to scamper down his arm and then skitter away a few yards. He frowns after the squirrel, rubbing at the side of his head, but doesn’t stop Quint from investigating the now-bare pavement. “Hey, about that, if we weren’t doing them often enough, or if you want more detail, or if you were just confused—I keep forgetting that the group text is really hard to follow if you don’t know the, um, the emoji shortcuts Erica and Cora like to use—”

“It was fine. Seriously. It wasn’t the emojis, I can deal with those, those are about ten levels of complexity below the Dhol Chants,” Stiles says. He’s a little concerned about Quint too, but needs to keep an eye on the label until it stops bleeding saffron and settles into one dimension. “I had a good vacation, I did actually rest, and I didn’t spend the entire time worried about what other people were doing because I secretly think they’re incompetent. Because you’re all actually very, very competent, and I know that and I just, I don’t know, I think I have envy issues.”

“Well, I know, I wasn’t saying I think you didn’t, I just wanted to make sure since you did come out here and you’ve never been through Thanksgiving in this town before and I know it can get a little—what?” Scott says. He turns towards Stiles, blinking in surprise. “But…you have a degree in Eldritch Horrors!”

Stiles gives Scott a wry smile. “Much as I’d like to say that, it’s just a minor. Dad wouldn’t let me go full-on Bio, with their casualty rate.”

“But still, the Esoteric Folklore and the Xeno…um, Xenochem, that’s—that’s really competent too. I mean, Allison’s shown me the degree requirements, and even Alan always says ask you or your dad if it looks even a little Cthulhu,” Scott says earnestly. Then he pauses and looks at Stiles. “That’s not it, is it? Because we definitely would’ve asked if we’d thought it was that, but we had vampire beetles a couple years ago so vampire earthworms didn’t seem like that much of a stretch.”

“Huh? No, look, I’m not—I’m not expecting you to consult with me about everything, and anyway, the Nemeton’s its own thing, just very, very big into Cthulhu cosplay,” Stiles says, shaking his head.

Something else shakes too. They both freeze and stare at the box until a flicker of gray moves past them. Scott, stifling an alarmed noise, grabs Quint back as the squirrel tries to approach one of the air-slits in the side. Quint’s tail-tentacles bush out a bit but he allows it, and with him out of the way, Stiles does a quick check of the seals on all of the edges.

“I’m gonna maybe put some more anti-tear sealant on the slits,” he says, after coming up with nothing. He kneels down and digs in his bag, then comes up with the appropriate bottle.

Scott nods and goes around the box. He scuffs at some dirty streaks on the pavement, then comes over to Stiles. “Should I start picking up the traffic cones yet?”

Stiles glances over at the be-ringed spot where the earthworm ball had been. “Maybe give it another five. Also, vampire beetles?”

“Cursed mummy that somebody brought in for a presentation in History,” Scott says, as if this should automatically make sense. Then he sees Stiles’ expression. “I think Derek has video, or if he doesn’t, Mom’s still got the autopsy files. I can ask her if we can borrow them.”

“No rush, she deserves a break too,” Stiles says, wiping excess sealant off of the rim of the bottle. He taps the little brush that comes in the cap, then starts dabbing at the box. “But anyway, no, look, you had your own lives before Dad and I came over, and we’re not here to totally upend them. We’re just here to hang out.”

Scott’s silent for a moment, but still moving around, so it’s a little bit of a surprise when he asks: “Did you want to be part of it?”

Not accusing or anything, just thoughtful, and when Stiles looks up, he’s watching Stiles like he’s…looking for a certain reaction. He does seem to recognize something, but not in a judge-y way, just like it was confirming something.

“I’m not an actual adrenaline junkie, for the record,” Stiles says, maybe a little defensively. “Yeah, I know, Miskatonic tends to keep your baseline higher than normal, but at the end of the day, it’s _academic_. We’re trying to make the unknown known, in a structured, systematic way. So I’m not looking for danger or anything, but I just—I come here to see you and Allison and your mom, and Laura and Cora, kind of, and…I’ll stay out of the way if I’m the problem, but otherwise, I don’t mind coming along and helping out. You don’t have to interrupt your work, I’m happy to squeeze into it.”

“It’s not really a job,” Scott says. Then looks down at the ground, rubbing his neck. His eyes flick back up to Stiles. “I know that. I know I act like it is, and that’s because somebody _does_ have to do it, or people will get hurt, but…I try not to get territorial about it. Because then I’m just like the packs we end up fighting off, and—I messed that up before. Mom, um, she yelled at me, and so did Allison. That was the first Thanksgiving I was a werewolf.”

Stiles blinks. “That didn’t make it into Derek’s movie.”

Which is very self-centered of him, but Scott being Scott, the other man doesn’t even pick up on Stiles’ grimace. “Peter and Mom and Laura had had a huge argument so we weren’t hanging out that week,” Scott tells him, as if he actually deserves an explanation. “But anyway, ever since then, I try—I think the reason, if there is a reason, for the whole true alpha thing is just that I try really hard to think about everybody. But that also means family and friends, and it’s just been really great having you around again, and—I know you know all this stuff, that you’re not going to get weirded out. But you also…you really seem to get excited about it? And that’s cool. I like that, and I’m learning a lot. It’s been a…I’ve been a werewolf for years now, and honestly, a lot of it _does_ seem like a job.”

“I do a lot of boring things too, you know. You’ve seen the official guide to proper footnoting,” Stiles says.

“I know, and Allison hates it already, but I think the rules about how to mark out which edition you’re using and what flaw in it’s relevant are actually kind of interesting,” Scott says. With big, sincere eyes. “It does seem like it’d help people not look up things that could hurt them.”

“Well, that’s not really how human psychology works at the University, but points for the optimism,” Stiles says. He gives the box a last dab, then stoppers the brush and steps back to scan the box with his phone to check for any disrupted runes. “Anyway, okay, this was Thanksgiving the first, anyway. Successfully in the books, with minimum police intervention and mostly replaceable bloodshed. So I’m definitely coming back next year, if that’s what you’re asking.”

Scott hadn’t been, and the way he brightens up, it almost makes Stiles feel guilty for treating it so casually. Because had he really thought Stiles might not come?

“If you can make it a day earlier, you could come to the pack meeting. We always have one on the Tuesday, so we can work out the game plan,” Scott says. He hesitates a couple times, but ends up pushing through. “You don’t have to. Just if you think you’d be interested. Just…can we definitely have you do the turkey? Mom really, really liked it, and she usually ends up working really long hours right before and after—Chris too, and aside from them, I, um, I don’t know…”

“That you trust them to make it edible?” Stiles suggests. Then snorts at Scott’s desperate attempt to not look like he instinctively agrees. “Okay, I think I can make that level of commitment. But just because you’re my best friend.”

Scott smiles. “Thanks, Stiles.”

“Any time, my friend. Any time.” Stiles pockets his phone, then looks at the box. “And speaking of, let’s get this into the car. Peter tells me we’ve got a one-hour window for the nightgaunt to land in the high school’s stadium without somebody seeing, and with how excited Caitlin looked on FaceTime, I don’t want to be the one who tells her she’s not getting these earthworms for the winter solstice.”

“Christmas, actually,” Scott says. He hands Stiles a pair of protective gloves, then pulls a set on himself. “She says they voted to just adopt it because it’s basically secular now, so it’s not a religious conflict and they can make more tour money dressing up the tunnels with decorations. Also reindeer headbands help hide their skull shape.”

Stiles opens his mouth, then shuts it and just picks up the tongs. Everybody celebrates in their own way, he knows that, and sometimes those ways change. That’s just how life is, and so long as nobody he cares about is in the hospital or the morgue, he’s not going to object.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lovecraft had a couple stories, which writers like Thomas Ligotti picked up later, playing with the idea that sorcerers of sufficient evilness could continue to live after death by transferring powers and a degree of sentience to the worms that ate their corpses.
> 
> Scott actually means scarab beetles à la _The Mummy_ (Brendan Fraser version).


End file.
